Drinks and Sinkholes

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Bev (short for Beverage Maiden) is the happy proprietor of the Weary Dragon Inn in Pigsend, a property she inherited just five years after turning up at the owner's door, an amnesiac with no possessions or history. But now, the soldiers of the Queen who outlawed most magic have arrived in town, and things are starting to go wrong. Somehow, it's Bev's responsibility to fix it all.

Review
Drinks and Sinkholes bills itself as ‘cozy fantasy' and it does deliver that – almost relentlessly. I wish it had done so with a little more humor.

As one might expect from a cozy fantasy, the emphasis here is not on realism, and that rapidly becomes apparent. The town this all takes place in is composed of just a few buildings and characters (even allowing for most of them being unmentioned in the background), and it takes some effort to suspend disbelief. The economy in particular troubled me – this is a world where a handful of muffins costs a gold piece, reconstruction of an entire house costs 100 gold pieces, and yet a woman saves her entire life to afford construction of an oven (whose cost is apparently so trivial it's not worth mentioning).

If you skim over the credibility stumbling blocks, the essentials of the story are essentially as expected – cute, friendly characters, low danger, an overall friendly vibe. That's all well and good, but my own expectation from ‘cozy' includes something of a sense of humor, and I found that missing here. The characters are all very earnest and broadly well-intended (though the background cast are fickle or cruel), but there's not much levity either in their interactions or in the prose, and I found that disappointing.

All in all, a workable story, but I found it more formulaic than inspired. I bought this in a three volume anthology, so we'll see whether things pick up in the following two books (out of a current total of ten in the series).