Month: April 2024

Can’t Spell Treason without Tea Review

Book: Can’t Spell Treason without Tea
Author: Rebecca Thorne
Publisher: Bramble / Tor Books
Year: 2024
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “All Reyna and Kianthe want is to open a bookshop that serves tea while firelight drifts between the rafters. However, Reyna works as one of the queen’s private guards, and Kianthe is the most powerful mage in existence. Leaving their lives isn’t so easy.
But after an assassin takes Reyna hostage, she decides she’s thoroughly done risking her life for a self-centered queen. Meanwhile, Kianthe has been waiting for a chance to flee responsibility – all the better that her girlfriend is on board. Together, they settle in Tawney, a town nestled in the icy tundra near dragon country, and open the shop of their dreams.
What follows is a cozy tale of mishaps, mysteries, and a murderous queen throwing the realm’s biggest temper tantrum, where these two women will discover just what they mean to each other…and the world.”

Review : This is another first for me, notably from the same publishing house as the last book I reviewed, a book that was originally independently published in 2022 and has now been picked up by a major publisher, scheduled to be re-released in 2024. I thought it looked familiar! Turns out I’ve been seeing people post about Can’t Spell Treason without Tea for a little while after it’s independent publishing. With the popularity of Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, it’s little wonder a book that credits Baldree’s debut novel with it’s inception, has done so well! I have also found myself swept up in Baldree’s world, searching for additional cozy fantasy novels since finishing both his books, so this was a welcome surprise.

Thorne has successfully created a cozy, relatively low-stakes, fantasy novel that seems to check all the boxes for me. There’s rich world-building without the confusing word salad that sometimes accompanies fantasy novels, I never once struggled to visualize the queendom or any of it’s surrounding countries; there’s just enough mention of tea blends, baked goods, and rolling fires without going so far down the rabbit hole that the entire story becomes a cook book; and there’s mystery and adventure, peppered with betrayal, gryphon flights, and just a dash of magic. It’s the perfect blend of everything I’m looking for in a cozy, no-anxiety, fantasy novel. Thorne sets us up well for additional books, something I’m greatly anticipating (I know there’s a second book coming! It, like the first book, was also originally independently published, but will be re-released later this year). I even tried to buy book two in it’s independent form, but it’s already been marked up to roughly $150 so, like the rest of you, I will be waiting until the fall for the second installment. And that’s about as high of praise as I can give – I never attempt to buy a sequel of a copy I’ve been gifted as an ARC, I try my hand at getting the review copy for the next book in the lineup, and if I don’t get it, I move on.

There were a couple instances where I felt this book could have benefitted from some additional editing, but I suspect that may come with a bit of time, experience, and additional books. None of it felt so grievous that I wouldn’t read more in the future or wouldn’t recommend the series to friends (which I have already done!), but it’s worth mentioning. First, I realize the series is literally called Tomes & Tea, but the overuse of the word “tome” grated on my nerves throughout the book. I think this book, and subsequent books, would benefit from occasionally referring to books as something other than tomes, but that’s a personal preference on my end and perhaps it doesn’t bother anyone else. And second, there were several instance of dialogue that felt so stilted, it was clear this is a debut novel – and I do thin that’s okay! Like I said, I think some of these small errors will be adjusted with time and experience and I expect that book two, and any further books Thorne decides to write, will likely improve. There’s a lot of overuse of the word “girlfriend” in conversation that doesn’t read true to spoken dialogue, or overly formal wording that doesn’t quite strike me as realistic to a verbal conversation. I’m aware that this is a fantasy and not meant to be realistic, but I do expect dialogue to be at least convincing.

Advice : I highly suggest you mark this one on your calendar! If you love cozy, low stakes, but highly enjoyable, smut-free fantasy, this will be right up your alley. If you enjoyed Travis Baldree’s books, this one is definitely for you.

The Coven Review

Book: The Coven
Author: Harper L Woods
Publisher: Bramble / Tor Books
Year: 2023 & 2024
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “I was raised to be my father’s weapon against the Coven, who had taken everything from him. I would do anything to keep my younger brother from suffering the same fate. My path lead me to the prestigious halls of Hollow’s Grove University, where witches learn to practice their magic free from human judgement.
There I come face-to-face with the beautiful and infuriating Headmaster, Alaric Grayson Thorne. He despises me just as much as I loathe him – in spite of the fire that burns between us…”

Review : This is a first for me, a book that has been previously published being sent out as an advanced reader copy. I admit, it took me a little bit of digging to figure out why I received an uncorrected advanced reading copy of a book that was published in 2023; it seems this marketing campaign is running ahead of a special edition publication of The Coven debuting in August of 2024, a month before the sequel releases. Whatever the case, this book has been circulating and doing surprisingly well over the last few months, so by the time I received an ARC, opinions had already filtered their way to me. I received this book and immediately heard from a friend how much they enjoyed it, I know the author has amassed a monstrous following on social media, falling into the category of fantasy romance which means the loyal fans are deeply loyal. I had expectations, to say the least.

Unfortunately, The Coven lived up to the low, low bar of my expectations. Now, before we dive in, please don’t get me wrong! I’m not here to shame anyone for reading smutty fantasy novels, I don’t look down my nose at the books or the readers of the genre. At all. However, it has been my experience that many of these fantasy romance authors, in an effort to churn out as many books as possible for their droves of die-hard fans, often sacrifice quality for quantity. Or even quality for smut. It’s fair to say that I went into this book with a bit of trepidation, knowing Woods’ second book is set to debut just a year after her first – a timeline which is pretty drawn-out as far as fantasy books are concerned lately. I expected this book would sacrifice plot for smut, but what I didn’t expect was the shoddy writing (though, perhaps I should have given the passive voice used in the synopsis).

*Spoilers Ahead*

The Coven is a hard to follow fantasy that very clearly draws on so many fantasy and witchy tv shows. Unfortunately for Woods, I too have watched so many fantasy and witchy tv shows, meaning my mind immediately jumped to all the storylines she’s at times all but outright copied. First of all, the vampire-witch romance trope is unbelievably overplayed, but if you’re going to go that route, at least stray away from names used in tv shows like Vampire Diaries (*cough* Alaric *cough*). I find it hard to believe that any reader interested in a book like The Coven hasn’t also watched Sabrina, Legacies, or A Discovery of Witches. Like I said, the vampire-witch struggle and eventual romance is played out. There’s something deeply aggravating about a controlling, toxic male vampire who for some unknown reason just cannot resist the temptation of an “impossible” and frustrating female witch. We’ve seen it played out hundreds of times through so many fantasy books, movies, and tv series…it’s not compelling. Pun not intended. There’s nothing about an over-done trope that makes me want to continue turning pages. It makes me want to throw the book in the trash.

My second issue with The Coven is that while I can appreciate that Woods chose to include content warnings at the beginning of the book, clueing the reader in that the central male character is nothing but toxic, at the end of the day the portrayal of a controlling, manipulative, and coercive relationship is at best disquieting and at worst misogynistic and traumatic. I have yet to decide where Woods falls on the spectrum with her male main character (MMC) – a content warning isn’t enough, simply choosing not to write toxic men into stories where the reader is meant to find their humanity and fall in love with them is more of what I’m looking for. And this leads me to my third grievance with The Coven, which is the, frankly, hard to believe convolution of the storyline that means we readers cannot actually find humanity with Woods’ MMC because he is, in fact, the literal devil. Woods has created a universe where magic is readily available to those who have magical family lines they’ve been fortunate to be born into. Magic, then, is available through whatever means your family line is able to work with : air, earth, water, life, crystals, and the cosmos. However! In Woods’ universe, this ever-present magic is only available through these forms thanks to a blood pact that was made with the literal christian devil, Lucifer Morningstar. I told you, convoluted.

It’s this blood pact that brings me to my fourth grievance with The Coven : setting. While this book is modern, the witches and their family lines all stem from Salem, MA, as if that trope weren’t played out enough already, though as you can see, Woods is not one to run from an overdone trope. Though we’re to believe that Salem is the pinnacle of witchy activity (and not, I don’t know, any of the sites where thousands of people were burned overseas thanks to an unrelenting witch-trial that barely made it’s way to the States), Woods chooses to use the name of someone who didn’t exist in real life as the witch-mother herself, she who made a pact with the devil. It’s like there are all these puzzle pieces and they’re all close enough to fitting, so you shove and shove at them, hoping they will eventually fit, only to realize they’re pieces from two different puzzles.

Finally, my last, and possibly my biggest frustration with The Coven is the slipshod writing Woods employs. We can see it first in the synopsis, an ever-present passive voice. All I could think as I read this book was how much my high school english teacher would have despised it (content aside). He drilled into my head on a regular basis how insufferable a passive voice is, and to this day it lives in my brain : thou shalt not use a passive voice. The Coven is a lot of “what had happened” – again, as you can see from the synopsis. The writing doesn’t improve as the book continues and given that this is an ARC of a book that’s already been published, I don’t suspect additional editing will truly occur here. This book is how it is, passive voice and all. Woods could have benefitted from removing about 50% of the occurrences of the word “that” as well, something that I would think any editor would notice in a first or second draft. Again, this is an ARC for an already published book. It is what it is.

Advice : If fantasy smut is your thing, this book is pretty dang boring. If quality writing is your thing, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. Don’t. Bother. It’s a waste of money and time. Trust me.

Devil is Fine Review

Book: Devil is Fine
Author: John Vercher
Publisher: Celadon Books
Year: 2024
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “From acclaimed novelist John Vercher, a poignant story of what it means to be a father, a son, a writer, and a biracial American fighting to reconcile the past.
Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney : he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.
Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovery – and a fight for reclamation – of a painful past. With the wit of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the nuance of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Devil is Fine is a darkly funny and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.”

Review : I had absolutely no idea what kind of wild ride I was getting myself into when I opened this book – full disclosure, the synopsis gives approximately 10% of the book away (okay, maybe I exaggerate…45%?). I started it a couple evenings ago and (spoilers), much like our protagonist, found myself losing time. I looked up two hours later, half the book read, and breathed out for the first time in who knows how long. Woah.

*Due to the little information provided by the synopsis, the majority of this review will contain spoilers, you have been warned.*

I absolutely demolished this book. I can’t even explain to you how quickly I devoured it. So much so that it wasn’t until this very moment I sat down to write this review that I realized we never get the narrator’s name. The novel begins with the narrator sitting in traffic on his way to his teenage son’s funeral, stopped somehow by construction, watching a construction worker do a dance while our narrator has a panic attack. A writer and tenure-track professor, our narrator is a biracial Black man working through what it means to exist in a post-2020 world where his audience and colleagues have largely appeared to have moved on from the protests and interests that were front and center just a few years ago. Finding the book he’s been working on tossed aside by one publishing house after the next, he finds his tenure tracked job suddenly on the rails. Unless he can get his new book picked up immediately, he risks losing his secure job. In the midst of the turmoil and trauma of not only losing his son but the prospect of losing his job, he receives a letter from his attorney : a large piece of property on the coast of Pennsylvania that was willed to his son has now passed to him. Our narrator decides to take a few extra days of bereavement leave to have a look, put the property on the market, and take a trip to a place he has hated since childhood – the beach.

It’s hard to fully explain the depth of surrealism that Vercher’s able to achieve in this work. Devil is Fine presents itself as a pretty realistic book grounded in a pretty realistic character, someone we might see teaching classes and publishing books, someone we might see on social media, someone we can relate to immediately as grounded in reality. It’s when our narrator makes his way to the sea, though, that the thread holding reality and dreams begin to unravel. On a cocktail of anti-anxiety medications, our narrator (who has been sober for 17 years) finds himself saying yes to a drink at the bar attached to his small rental at the beach. As it turns out, the property he’s inherited has not come with any kind of structure so he rents from a bartender / realtor / bike shop owner who serves as his off-the-wagon enabler, serving drink after drink after damned drink to a man who very clearly should not be served in the first place. There are so many moments of frustration and grief that swirl throughout this story, and this relationship between alcohol, medications, and those who egg him on while simultaneously providing a form of magical-comedic-grounding relief is one of them.

As our narrator dives deeper into the all too familiar taste of alcoholism, he begins to find himself plagued by sleep paralysis – or so it seems. Waking to find emails sent, book proposals drafted, and responses given in the middle of the night, what should ultimately be a fairly benign experience begins to take on supernatural undertones. When our narrator, in a fairly drunken haze, steps barefoot onto his beachfront property one night, he unexpectedly, and painfully steps on a dead jellyfish, stung even in it’s death. Now he’s not only battling alcohol and medication induced sleep demons, he’s also battling physical pain. The boundaries around the natural world begin to swim and blur and fracture, creating ghostly appearances, pulling mementos from his past into his present, and allowing him to have, what had until now been a one-sided conversation with his son, a two-sided conversation with the dead.

It is during this unraveling of reality that our narrator comes to find that the sprawling beachfront property he’s inherited is actually a former plantation, owned and passed down by the members of the white side of his family. Through this dream-like experiences, our narrator begins to confront the very real demons of his past, the generational curses that follow family members, and perhaps even emerge from beyond the grave, and the father-son relationships that not only created his relationship with his son but mirror his relationship with his own father. It’s through this reality bending that our narrator begins to find the space to heal the wounds that have lead to the at times fractured relationship he and his son shared. We begin to see reality for what it is, not something that exists in one time and place, but something that bends and moves, shaping and folding itself over generations, creating and dissolving into each family member until they’re ready and capable of finding the healing necessary to move forward.

Advice : I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This is hands down one of my top books of the year. It’s expertly crafted, full of intricate detail, and that ending! My god! The ending! I won’t spoil it for you, but trust me when I say this is a must read.

The Manicurist’s Daughter

Book: The Manicurist’s Daughter
Author: Susan Lieu
Publisher: Celadon Books
Year: 2024
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Susan Lieu has long been searching or answers. About her family’s past and about her own future. Refugees from the Vietnam War, Susan’s family escaped to California in the 1980s after five failed attempts. Upon arrival, Susan’s mother was their savvy, charismatic North Star, setting up two successful nail salons and orchestrating every success – until Susan was eleven. That year, her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. After the funeral, no one was ever allowed to talk about her or what had happened.
For the next twenty years, Susan navigated a series of cascading questions alone – why did the most perfect person in her life want to change her body? Why would no one tell her about her mother’s life in Vietnam? And how did this surgeon, who preyed on Vietnamese immigrants, go on operations after her mother’s death? Sifting through depositions, tracking down the surgeon’s family, and enlisting the help of spirit channelers, Susan uncovers the painful truth of her mother, herself, and the impossible ideal of beauty.
The Manicurist’s Daughter is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world.”

Review : I was really excited to dive into this advanced copy memoir after reading the letter to the reader Lieu included with the book – but I’m realizing now that much of what was covered in the letter isn’t touched on in the back cover synopsis, so I’m not sure you’re seeing the wild ride that her letter was, so I’ll share a bit of it here with you : “For the last two decades, no one in my family has ever spoken of her or how she died. I would ask questions, but they said I was being too emotional or stuck in the past. Desperate for answers, I joined a cult, tracked down the family of my mother’s surgeon, and sought justice through the help of spirit channelers.” This is all within the first few sentences in her letter to the reader! What a wild ride, I thought, I couldn’t wait to get into the meat of this memoir.

A comedian by trade, Lieu writes in a way that showcases her humor, leading us through her life as the youngest daughter of Vietnamese immigrant parents with off the cuff remarks that leave you laughing out loud, winding deftly through the trauma and emotional turmoil of losing a parent so young, guiding us through struggling to find answers while upholding a nearly impossible personal and familial standard; from feeling lost while navigating ivy league schooling to searching for answers from beyond the veil, Lieu takes us on, what ends up being, a winding and at times rather bumpy road. From the beginning, Lieu makes it clear that body image, food, and self worth are deeply connected within her family – something we can see clearly played out in the tummy tuck operation that ultimately takes her mother’s life at a mere 38 years old. Not only is Lieu constantly criticized for any weight she might put on, she’s also forced to consume every single piece of food that’s put before her, at least once to the point of vomiting. Lieu struggles so desperately for answers as to why her mother might have felt the need to have a cosmetic procedure for so much of her life, all the while laying it out methodically for the reader to understand, like a neon sign flashing in front of our eyes.

It’s for this exact reason that this book should be read with caution – tread lightly my friends, if you have struggled with disordered eating this book may present complications for you. The majority of the book revolves around food, so much so that part of the advanced reader copy package included a few postcards with pictures of traditional Vietnamese foods on them. While I think the point that Lieu is trying to make is an important one, there are a lot of complex emotions and ties to food in this book that may bring up some difficult emotions in the reader. Lieu refers so fondly to the dishes her family members made while she was growing up, speaking kindly of the foods her relatives make when she comes home to visit as an adult, while simultaneously speaking poorly of her body, her body image, and the way her body is objectified by those around her. It’s complex and confusing at times, but only in the sense that those who have not navigated this ground themselves may struggle to understand the difficulty one faces when they’re told over and over to shrink themselves. This book requires a content warning.

There are some pacing issues I struggled with in this memoir, places where Lieu spent so much time, chapters even, and places where she jumped around almost frantically. You probably know how much I hate being told what’s going on, and while Lieu doesn’t do this, there are connections she asks her reader to make that at times aren’t given enough context to make on our own. I’m a little perplexed as to why the pacing is so frenetic an uneven, with certain aspects of her personal story garnering so much attention while others warrant no more than a sentence or two. The time frame is a bit scattered, at times being not quite chronological, jumping from the past to the present of Lieu’s own life, and I feel she might have benefitted from gently tweaking the format.

These few issues aside, I found Lieu’s work to be an important embrace of family history, of breaking down the barriers that exist between family members, and of honest inspection of how generational curses impact our lives. In writing this memoir, Lieu is doing the work to heal not only her own self, but the individual members of her family, and past generations of her family as well. It’s an important read, but it does come with some necessary warning.

Advice : If you enjoy a memoir I really think this is going to be right up your alley. If you’ve struggled with disordered eating, I might avoid this one for your own sake.