There’s a recent trend in cozy SFF of having the main characters starting a small business, generally something that acts as a gathering place like a coffee shop or a bookstore. These stories overlook how much work and stress running a small business is! I get that the idea of spending all your time in a cozy yarn store is appealing, and these kinds of places are important for building community. But the fantasy of ease to me undermines one of the key points of cozy fantasy: that building community and performing domestic labor are work. Taking away that labor undervalues work that is already undervalued, instead of showing how vital that work really is.

Oh, that's it. I enjoyed Legends & Lattes enough to pick up the second one, but it's not really a genre I'd come back to. I think I just didn't recognize it because I've never worked retail. I definitely can't read cozy mysteries set in libraries because I know too much about how libraries work.