Emily Vance Brown

by Travis Baldree

4/5

This was one of the coziest fantasies I’ve read in a long time. If I’d managed to time my reading to be more in tune with the seasons, I would have saved this for the middle of winter. It’s as warm and comforting as one of the cups of coffee served at the books’ namesake fictional cafe. 

As far as fantasies go, I thought this was incredibly accessible. There’s not much mental labor required to make sense of the worldbuilding, and the coffee shop that the main narrative focuses on is similar enough to a real world coffee shop that it’s easy to visualize. The characters are all incredibly loveable, with few villains other than those that can be easily persuaded to back off with a gift of a some heavenly pastries. 

My only complaint is that I would have liked to learn more about Tandri’s backstory and for Viv’s and Tandri’s romance to have developed at a slower pace. They seemed to fall in love nearly overnight, which I understand is a standard trope of the romance genre, but it’s still not my favorite! It would have been nice to witness more intimate conversations between the two of them while they were still friends so that we could pick up on the more subtle nuances of their romantic feelings for each other.