unique and thought-provoking novel that combines elements of magical realism, humor, and deep exploration of life and death.

This is a story of hope and second chances. It is cosy and wonderful and sweet in all the ways we need right now. It speaks to retired soldiers and the guilt they have in a way that reflects truth but gives hope. Beautiful and endearing writing that really finds a way into your heart. Highly recommend. 5 Stars!

This book has so much heart! One for the cozy fantasy readers and lovers of Legends and Lattes.

I almost put this down because the first chapters read too high fantasy for my taste, but the narrative shifted into cozy territory after that initial world building.

The writing was not perfect, but there’s a lot to love. On a sentence level the writing ia often beautiful and quite charming. However, the plot felt jumpy in spots (for example, why does this character care about this other character?). A little deus ex machina in spots? I didn’t find this too offputting because ultimately the story was just so sweet.

I would happily read more set in this world.

Cosy fantasy is something else. It’s just the comfort of a cosy blanket and a hot chocolate in book form. It’s low stakes, but great story. This book is exactly that. I don’t know what made me want to read the book more: the title, the cover (It reminds me of Howl’s moving castle), or the plot. In any instance, I’m so glad I got a change to read this.

Rottgor has spent centuries as an undead knight, but now he has had retirement forced upon him. What’s an Orc to do? This book was unexpectedly thought provoking in parts, but also I just really enjoyed some of the different magic systems - especially to do with how he was “retired”. The storyline was fun, and I adore the ending. It was everything I was hoping it would be while I was reading it.

Wholesome vibes and sometimes you just need to be in a cozy spot and read this NOWWW. I highly recommend this oneee

This book is so good!
An orc, once forced to serve as an undead knight and commit terrible atrocities, somehow managed to overthrow his evil overlords alongside five companions. Afterward, he spent centuries helping build and protect a city. Now, he's being given a second chance at life— and he must remember who he was and decide who he wants to be, all while battling the lingering voices of evil in his mind.
Surrounding him is a beautiful found family and a supportive community. There’s also a kid with a secret who needs protecting—and trust me, they are awesome. Along the way, we encounter people full of fear and prejudice, adding depth and tension to the story.
While the stakes are high, there’s a comforting sense that things will ultimately be okay. Despite tackling some tough themes, this book is tender, cozy, and full of heart.
It releases in October, and I highly recommend picking it up!

First of all, thank you NetGalley and Bindery Books/Cozy Quill for the opportunity to read this ARC!

This was such a pleasant book to read. Coming right out of a heavy, dystopian book I really needed something wholesome and hopeful, and this was exactly what I wanted it would be.

So, what’s it about you ask? Well, it’s about an undead orc who is forced to retire from centuries as a guard, and has to figure out what to do with this Unexpected Afterlife ;) Sooo as the rest of the title might give away, there is a lot of food involved in this new life he builds for himself, and honestly it made me want to just go to a market, buy fresh produce and just stand in the kitchen all day.

It’s the perfect cozy fantasy, but it does have some darker elements and a pretty high stakes conflict, which makes it more engaging than I’ve experienced a lot of similar books to be. Still it has that slow pace and warmth to it that makes it feel like a big hug. The found family vibes actually had me in tears several times.

Since this book isn’t releasing until october this year I’ve overlooked the editing misses in my rating, I expect that will be fixed in the published version, but what I can’t overlook is the huge plot hole at the end. There’s this conflict going on and the MC goes “well come back tomorrow and we can talk about it” and then we just never talk about it???? like a year goes by but we never get to know what happened to that??? There were also some weird gaps/time skips where we were in one place and then suddenly somewhere else in the next scentece, but I think that’s also a thing that will be fixed with some editing, so I didn’t really mind too much.

Also the first ten or so percent of the book where very heavy on world building, almost a little info-dumpey, and it was a bit tough to follow (although I’d slept like 4 hours when I read those so it might just be a me problem, honestly)

Either way, the vibes where immacualte and I would definitely recommend checking this out when it comes out!

This book was so wholesome I could cry, it was perfect.

Rottgor's journey was so beautiful and the characters were so well written. So recommended

Thank you to NetGalley and Bindery Books/Cozy Quill for the chance to review.

Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife was an unexpectedly enjoyable read for ​me. The world-building and character descriptions were so detailed and immersive that I found my imagination capable of creating vivid scenes. I had not yet wholly experienced the sensation of a "cozy read" until I read this story. 

The synopsis was the main reason for my desire to read this ARC. It was endearing and heartfelt. While I was reading this, that same sense of feeling stayed with me. Every character provided depth and importance to the story, which provided an overarching family feel. I couldn't help but feel an attachment to the restaurant employees. So much so that I wished I could become one.

What made this story unique for me was the magic system. Not only does the bloodline have an impact on the character Rune's ability, but their personalities entwine with it and make it unique. It was a beautiful way to express that your ancestry does not determine who you will become.

The plot included PTSD, adoption, found family, loyalty, love, self-reclamation, and political outrage. Some of these topics may be perceived as heavy points of content, but I found that the author included them in a delicate, non-confronting manner. Every aspect came together beautifully to portray the overall self-reclamation plot point.

I enjoyed every minute spent reading this story! I will definitely grab a copy on release as I also fell in love with the cover art!

This story starts off with a brief look at the main character, Razgaif’s childhood, and how his father taught him to cook. He had hopes then to become the siefu, his orc clan’s battle chef. Then the story continues where he is now in Necropolis, as Rottgor, the Lord Commander of the Ruinous Guard. Rottgor has been undead for centuries, serving his afterlife as a thrall for the Worm King, where he left destruction and chaos in wake as the Famine Blade. After having to unwillingly serve the Worm King for years, he and the Six Shadows overthrew the King, founded the city of Necropolis, and vowed its protection. Rottgor has not been living his afterlife, he is simply going through the motions. The heir apparent, Lady Cleo, has other plans for the rest of Rottgor's afterlife and forces him to retire. Thankfully, an opportunity arises where he can fulfill his dreams, leading to adventures that he never would have expected.
It is a lovely story that reminds me of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes. It is a comforting read that will warm the cockles of your heart. It will make you laugh and cry, and hang on every feel until the end. It is worth the read.

#ThxNetGalley #DestonJMunden #RecipesforanUnexpectedAfterlife

This is a cozy fantasy about an undead orc reclaiming his afterlife.

The characters are interesting and each experience their own little journey throughout the book. The world building, specifically the conflict between the living and the dead, was thought out. There are living people that have no issues with the dead walking around and then there are living who greatly detest it.

The issues I have with this book is the awkward pacing and the characterization of some characters. Calfe is immediately ride or die with Razgaif, which is a mood but also confusing. Also the restaurant that Razgaif opens just does well in the background without any exploration into how it's doing.

This book is much compared with <i>[book:Legends & Lattes|61242426]</i>, and for once that's accurate. Not only were they discovered by the same "tastemaker" (which is apparently a thing now), they both feature a retired Orcish warrior taking on a cozy project in food-and-beverage retail. My own feeling is that if you liked one, you'll probably like the other, though this isn't just a clone of <i>Legends</i>; the plot is different in detail, and so is the main character's backstory, which plays into the frontstory a lot more in this book than in the other.

The MC is not just an orc, but an undead orc, killed and then raised by a typical evil necromancer a couple of hundred years before and forced to commit atrocities as a mind-controlled thrall. He and five others broke free from the necromancer's control (exactly how is carefully not stated), destroyed him, and founded a city in which the living, the undead and those summoned from other realms could live together peacefully and prosperously. He then served the city for a long time as a member of an elite guard, but now a new ruler is taking over, and she decides it's time for him to retire from the guard, undergo a necromantic process that restores him to something much closer to life, and do what he wants instead of serving the will of others. But what does he want?

Back during the relatively brief time he was alive, he was an Orcish war chef (which I kept reading as "war chief," but it's chef), a special traditional role that's like an army cook, but respected. So he decides to open a restaurant and start cooking again. After so long, he doesn't know if he can do it, but he rapidly acquires a group of friends who encourage him: a professor who's also some sort of gang boss (but in a good way?), his restaurant employees, and a ten-year-old girl he happens to meet. This young girl turns out to have a connection to his past that requires some working through.

Although this is definitely cozy, it's not just slice-of-life without conflict. There's a rabble-rouser in the city who hates the undead (and the summoned, but mainly the undead) and believes that the living should have everything, and he and his faction cause escalating problems. And the orc and one of his oldest friends, another of the six founders of the city, come into conflict over the little girl's heritage and what it means.

From a plot point of view, all of this works excellently, and the MC has a considerable character arc which is believable and moving, involving a change of name - which is why I'm not using his name in my review. There are some indications that the author needs more experience (and more editorial input), though. To me, the employees weren't distinct enough, and I had to keep thinking hard to remember which was which, even though they were each a different kind of undead or summoned entity (it says at one point, I think, that he'd also hired living employees, but if this was true I missed which one that was, unless the vampire doesn't count as truly undead). At one point, there are two different and contradictory explanations for the origin of the orphanage (noblemen's buildings claimed by the state or a donation by the former owner) within a single paragraph. A person has grey hair on one page and brown hair on the next. I've already mentioned the careful skirting of the plot hole about how mind-controlled thralls broke out of their conditioning and overthrew the necromancer. I was sometimes taken by surprise, too, by how much or how little time had passed between two indicators of when things were happening, given the events in between.

Relevant to that last point, the author has the common fault of often not using the past perfect tense when talking about events that happened prior to the current narrative moment, which I always find disorienting and distracting. What I mean is that in a sentence that should run "she needed to trust the system she and her family had created" or "the room had never looked better" or "he had never truly let it all sink in," the "had" gets left out, resulting in a moment of temporal whiplash while I parse it.

The author also reaches beyond his vocabulary at times, and unfortunately "mediocrity" is one of the words that's apparently beyond his vocabulary (he writes "mediocracy" instead). In fact, it has a lot of small glitches, like missing words, vocabulary errors and fumbled idioms. They're not in every sentence or even on every page - there are usually two or three per chapter - and (standard disclaimer) I read a pre-release copy via Netgalley, and there may be more copy editing to come.

While all of these minor issues reduced my enjoyment (they may or may not affect yours), overall I did think this was a strong debut. It's positive and hopeful - relentlessly so at times, insisting that nobody is born evil, that we're shaped by our environment and, secondarily, our choices. The city of necromancy is, we're told over and over, one of the safest in the kingdom, though it's having an atypical time in this particular story. A dupe of the populist manipulator comes round relatively easily to a verbal appeal and admits he was fooled, which I found slightly unrealistic, but I suppose if "it's too hopeful" is one of my complaints, the author has at least understood the cozy genre. There is an unexamined tension, though, between the cozy values and the violence of a sword-and-sorcery setting, and I was never completely clear on what the fate of the antagonist actually was - which may have been another intentional skirting of an issue, or just the author not clearly conveying what was in his mind.

It lands in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, which is usually for solid work with no significant issues, but in this case reflects what would be a Gold-tier book (emotionally moving, strongly written) demoted by a tier for vocabulary errors, missing past perfect and not completely making sense all the time. Still a recommendation, and since most people don't notice these things and some of them may even be corrected before publication, I suspect that it has a strong future ahead of it, and possibly some awards.

The first 25% of the book was a bit hard to get into, it was a tad bit boring, the info dumps were repetitive, and the characters lacked depth and were one dimensional.

HOWEVER, the back half of this book is exactly what I was looking for when I picked it up. The pacing was better, we were shown not told how things were happeneing, the plot finally progressed (and in a great direction), and the characters felt more relatable and entertaining. This book was definitely cozy and had absolutely stunning prose with absolutely lovely heartwarming quotes about living life for yourself and finding your found family. Overall, I think this book was very well done but a bit dragging in the beginning.

This is a truly lovely & special book 🥹
I absolutely ate this up, and adored every moment of it!!

As a fan of T. Kingfisher’s “Paladins Grace” and Travis Baldtree’s “Legends and Lattes”, this story was definitely a hit for me!! Our main character is an undead orc knight who gave years of both his living and undead life to serving and fighting. When the decision to retire is made for him, he finally is able to find his way back to who he was, and figure out who he is without a weapon in his hand.

This was such a beautiful story about starting over, finding yourself again, found family, and enjoying life. I love the magic, the world building, and all the magical characters. Astra and Razgaif are such sweet beans 🫘 they deserve the world!

Overall this story is a refreshing and magical take on the whole “cozy life retirement after fighting for others” books that I’ve devoured in the past. I hope that others will appreciate the beauty of this story, I definitely recommend!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 👩🏾‍🍳💕

This book is perfect for people who enjoy cozy animes like Delicious in Dungeon or cozy books like Legends & Lattes! There were so many high fantasy elements present here (also great for D&D fans), in addition to a story about friendship.

Thank you to Bindery Books/Cozy Quill for this ARC!

This was such a fun, cozy read! Undead orcs, gargoyles, elfdwarves, necromancers all set in a rich high fantasy world. A heart warming story of self reflection, going back to your roots, and discovering your passion. Of finding a family of your own and building a community in the face adversity. If you liked Legends and Lattes, this is definitely a good one to add to your TBR!

I’ll be doing a full review over on my blog soon!

For Fans of Legends and Lattes and with the vibe of a LitRPG, this cozy fantasy is all about found family, learning to live life, and dealing with both trauma and uncertainty. this book was so sweet and cute, and filled with a cast of unique characters. there were several scenes that made me laugh, and a few that made me feel a little too seen. learning how to move on when you've been stuck in a routine for so long can be insanely hard, and i loved the representation of anxiety and panic attacks in here. it all felt a little rushed, but overall i had a fantastic time and ended up finishing it the same day i started. if you like cozy fantasy, brutal warriors learning to live a normal life, and a happy ever after for everyone involved, then this is an absolute must read.

Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife by Deston J. Munden
Rottgor is an undead orc who retires as a soldier to go after his passion when he was alive: cooking. Through his journey of rediscovering who he was in the past and what he is now, he will learn the power of friendship, family, and good food.
The book's cover inspired me to read this fantasy tale. I imagined the whole book as a mix of the cover and some of my favorite cartoons, like Adventure Time and Hilda, making it a thousand times cozier for me.
The character arc that Rottgor/Razgaif went through was fulfilling. I hope this eventually becomes a series and Tyltli finds her peace.


I got to read this advanced copy thanks to Netgalley.

Rottgor is forced into a very late retirement and now has to figure out what to do with his (after)life. When I saw this show up on NetGalley I immediately applied for an ARC because this book is SO up my alley: cozy fantasy, found family, tasty food. Unfortunately the book just didn't deliver for me. It was such a struggle to finish this one and if this wasn't an ARC and I wasn't determined to give it my best I would've DNF'd for sure. Is it all bad? Of course not, there's actually some really interesting world building. But unfortunately it was not the cozy fantasy of my dreams.

The Good:
- As I said I really like the worldbuilding. It takes place in a city built by Rottgor and his undead buddies after defeating their necormancer overlord. Now, centuries later, the living and undead live side by side. The whole idea of the undead finding new purpose in life is really sweet.
- The magic system: I love how everyone has magic that is very unique to them and their personality. I also love how the magic has an aura of its own that you can even hear and smell.
- I loved reading the flashbacks of the MC's previous life. It's a very unique view on Orcish society and culture.

The Could be better:
- The writer used new terms for races or entirely new races (I'm not quite sure which), but didn't quite manage to describe them in a way that made it really hard for me to picture them or understand really what they were. (Though props for introducing half elf half dwarf combos. Why do combinations like these not appear more often in fantasy?)
- Some plot holes in the story that challenged my suspension of disbelief. Like the orphans are too poor for food or shoes, but they live in a literal mansion and the city government takes good care of its orphans? Also the dialogue as was just not believable at times. Astra sounds more like a 15 year old than a 9/10 year old.

The Bad:
- The most important part of a book to me are the characters. While I liked Rottgor and all the side characters well enough on their own, the interactions just didn't add up. How is Calfe basically willing to kill/die on behalf of Rottgor just after meeting him and having one lunch together? One meeting with Astra and Rottgor immediately has deep paternal feelings for her (not in a creepy way mind you, it never went there). The employees are all hired/introduced at the same time and there's an instant back and forth between everyone. It was overall way too sweet even for me. And I love cute and sweet stories.
- The pacing was way off. Too much of the story was spent on Rottgor second guessing himself and despairing. It took 20% for him to even settle on opening a restaurant. At about 40% the restaurant opened. There is no time really spent on actually trial and error because the restaurant is an instant hit. And let me tell you something: I devoured 4 long books on magical farming life. I can handle a slow pace. But I cannot stand if the slow pace is filled with navelgazing instead of doing something, really, anything at all. I'd rather read the MC trying out twenty soup recipes rather than doubting themselves over and over again. The book isn't even that long, but felt at least twice as long than it was.

Now I did get a very early ARC, so I don't know, maybe there's going to be another round of edits. I really hope it will, because I had such high hopes from this premise. Thanks NetGalley and Cozy Quill from Bindery Books for granting me this ARC. All opinions are my own.

If you're a fan of Legends and Lattes, this might be the book for you. Cosy fantasy setting with a clear passion for the love of food, Munden really captures the flavours of what makes a good hearty meal and narrative. I wanted to give this a higher rating but there were some elements which didn’t sell it for me. Sometimes the lack of descriptions of creatures but the over explanation of internal monologues, and I wasn’t convinced entirely by the younger characters voice. I found it difficult to place her age or even her language to be believable as a child. But, saying that, I do love the element of found family, healing trauma, the political storyline between living and dead. There was enough for me to keep wanting to turn the page.