Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk (Embervein Emporia #1)
by Coyote J.M. Edwards
My Rating: 4 stars
Genre: Cozy Fantasy
Age Category: Adult
Type of romance: no romance
Blurb:
What should a battle-worn 11-foot tall drider do when she’s retiring from the Ember Guard and looking for a big change? Open a cafe, of course! Unfortunately, Gwen’s skills are highly specialized—she can contain a magical anomaly to protect the innocent without blinking, but taking inventory and tracking profits makes her sweat bullets. It’s not long before she wonders if patrolling the streets of Embervein wasn’t a safer bet.Help comes in the form of the city’s finest—a tireless minotaur raising two kids alone, a teenage dryad with trust issues, and Gwen’s old partner in the Guard who can’t tell a coffee machine from a milk steamer. Is this unlikely group of friends really enough to save Gwen from certain failure?
Find out what it means to put it all on the line in Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk, a modern cozy fantasy.
My Review
I really like the cozy fantasy genre and when I saw this series with one book being free and the other cheap I didn’t hesitate to grab both books. Then when I was in the mood for a cozy fantasy read I started reading this one. Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk was a fun cozy read. I liked the cozy atmosphere and the found family vibes. It follows main character Gwen who starts her own cafe, but things don’t always go smoothly.
This was a shorter read, but despite the length the story never felt rushed. It was paced very well. There were time skips between scenes sometimes, which worked well. I liked reading about Gwen, the side characters from her previous job as well as the employees she hires for her café. I felt it was easy to get a feel for all the characters their personalities. I also was interesting to see their struggles and how things got resolved by the end of the book.
I also liked how Gwen was a Drider, which is a spider-like monster. In fact the whole book is filled with monster characters which was fun to read about. I liked the little details about Gwen being faster at making coffee due to her extra arms or wanting an extra large door so all monsters could enter the cafe. I would’ve liked to see even more of those details as I really liked those.
To summarize: This was such a fun and cozy read. It was an easy read and while it was short it didn’t feel rushed. I enjoyed reading about Gwen the café she was starting. There are some struggles she has along the way and I liked seeing how everything got resolved. I liked how there were so many monster characters and some fun details about them like how Gwen uses her 3 pairs of arms to make coffee quicker. All in all I had a great time with this one and plan to read more by this author.
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