Adrienne Martini Reviews Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
Bookshops & Bonedust, Travis Baldree (Tor 978-1-250-88610-1, $17.99, 288 pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Carson Lowmiller.
Don’t get me wrong; I love a book that challenges my idea of what a story is or how language can work or both. But the last few years have given me a new appreciation for a story where the biggest hurdle is which character can be the most humane, even if said characters aren’t exactly human.
Becky Chambers perfected the spec-fiction-but-make-it-comforting subgenre with her Monk and Robot stories. Now Travis Baldree is adding to what styles it can contain. His Legends & Lattes, which began as a NaNoWriMo project, shot up the New York Times bestseller list. Bookshops & Bonedust, a prequel of sorts, will likely be right behind it. Clearly, there is an audience for low-stakes fantasy.
Make no mistake here. Baldree’s orc Viv and the rattkin Fern aren’t on a quest of any sort. The future of the world is not balanced on the head of a pin, and no one need schlep oneself to Mount Doom. Instead, Viv experiences some personal growth and saves the seaside town of Murk from something unpleasant. You know going in that the ending will be satisfying, if slightly unpredictable. But Bookshops & Bonedust isn’t about its plot. It’s about walking each other home, as the adage goes, and learning how to exist in a fraught world.
What Baldree does he does well. His prose is direct and engaging without being simple, even if he does throw in a distractingly clever turn of phrase on occasion, like lectern made of bones exploding in a ‘‘fountain of phalanges.’’ Mostly, though, Bookshops & Bonedust is the story equivalent of a warm blanket on a bleak day. And that’s all it aims to be.
Adrienne Martini has been reading or writing about science fiction for decades and has had two non-fiction, non-genre books published by Simon and Schuster. She lives in Upstate New York with one husband, two kids, and one corgi. She also runs a lot.
This review and more like it in the February 2024 issue of Locus.
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