Tea time!

 I thought joining a new book club online would be fun. Anything to expand my reading and get me social, right? Plum Deluxe tea has a Facebook group for it's book club and the list for the year sounded pretty good. Each month is a live Zoom to talk about the book.

If I had paid attention I would have seen that the live talk was on my virtual Knit and Bitch night. D'oh! I'm pretty sure the folks in my KnB group will be ok moving it one night a month :) 

This month's book was Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim. I found it on Amazon Kindle for $3.99 and got it read in time. All of those are magical things. The book? Well, it was a bit more fluffy than I would normally ever read. A bit more chick lit (I actually don't know if it is chick lit, but it feels like it).

Vanessa is a Chinese-American living on the West Coast and she has always had the ability to tell fortunes for people when looking at tea leaves. Apparently, this gift runs in the family and her Aunt Evelyn tries to teach her the rules and ways of fortune telling but Vanessa is stubborn and won't listen. So she endures horrible headaches with her fortune telling, while desperately wishing for love and to be free of this gift.

Her family, mom and aunties in particular, spend money to bring in a renowned matchmaker from China for poor Vanessa. I guess not being wed is a terrible sin? The matchmaker doesn't see a soulmate for Vanessa. After a last, particularly painful and devastating fortune, is blurted out, Vanessa decides she wants Evelyn to teach her the ways of fortune tellers.

That involves going to Paris for months and working in her aunt's tea shop. Oh, the humanity.

The descriptions of Paris and the food were actually really well done and made me jealous. We're relentlessly hit over the head that Vanessa is a "foodie" and she's desperate for love. It just soaks into every part of the story. Vanessa is a bit childish but, per chick lit rules, she has an encounter that forces her to grow up and take charge of herself. There were some odd twists at the end that seem to resolve the mystical gift issue, but honestly, it left me with questions.

Is this a normal thing in this book's world? If I went to a tea shop and some woman told me my dad was going to die and described how, I wouldn't be ok with that. It would be hard to just "shrug off" and I would wonder what the hell was going on. But in this world, it seems like a normal thing. You want to try a new tea sample? Here's how your dad is going to die. Okey dokey. (I know this is magical realism, but... ok, my head couldn't wrap around this :) )

If chick lit and romance-y type books are your jam, I imagine you'll like this. I enjoyed the tea, food, and Paris backdrop and was just happy with that!

Interview with the author

There are years that ask questions and years that answer

When I got Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston for a book club, I was fairly sure that I had read it before. Goodreads showed that I read it in 2005. I couldn't for the life of me remember it so I went ahead and downloaded the audiobook from Audible to listen to while I finished knitting gifts. 

Almost immediately into the book, I started remembering it. When Tea Cake was mentioned, nearly all of it came back to me (I'm not sure why Tea Cake triggered my memories). There were so many moments in this novel where I just sat down whatever I was doing to listen. The narrator, Ruby Dee, is phenomenal.  The writing by Zora Neale Hurston was phenomenal. The story is so well done, I was invested at every step with Janie. 

I'm delighted that Ruby Dee's version of the audio book is out on YouTube where you can listen for free. It's less than 7 hours and a billion percent worth taking your time to listen. 

There is also a movie with Halle Berry but I can't find a good trailer or the movie to share. 

The novel starts off with Janie Crawford walking back, barefoot and in overalls, to her home in Eatonville, Florida. Her neighbors are sitting on a porch chatting when they spy her walking up the road. We know nothing about Janie yet, but we know she is a source of gossip among the towns people. Janie gets back to her big house and opens it up to air out. Her best friend, Pheoby, comes by with food for her. That's when we realize that Janie has been gone a while. Her leaving with a "younger man" and being away for years has made her more of a source of gossip than her previous life in Eatonville.

Thankfully, Janie sits and tells Pheoby her story. We learn she was raised by her grandma, who was once a slave, and her grandma married her off so she would have stability. But Janie wanted love, which she was not getting in her marriage. She happened to meet Joe Starks, who was heading to Eatonville, Florida to an all-black community to help build it up. She was taken with Joe, so she left with him.

Eatonville wasn't all they imagined. Joe had the money to help buy more land and start building it up, putting in a general store and eventually becoming Mayor. Which made Janie a prominent person in town as well, much to her dismay. Janie was a trophy wife to Joe, nothing more. She endured a lot as his wife, quite a lot of verbal and some physical abuse. My heart broke for her during this time of her life. She had been told what to do by her grandma, her first husband, and now Joe. You can feel her longing to be herself and to be the type of person who has a relationship where love is key, not money, stability or whatever other excuse people made. 

Eventually, Joe does die and Janie is left with all of the inheritance, including the big, fancy house Joe built. She still works the general store but keeps to herself, until Tea Cake walks in. He has no money to his name, really, but he falls hard for Janie and she does the same. This seems to be the relationship she's always wanted. 

Their time together is beautiful and painful and ends sooner than it should. Hurston takes us through all of it, edge of our seat, crying, and worried. It's a rollercoaster.

From my 2022 perspective, the domestic violence inflicted on the women in this novel is incredibly disturbing. Especially in regards to how Janie was treated by people who supposedly loved her. I'm guessing that is how things were back then but that is still hard to swallow. 

Also from my 2022 perspective, how men overall treated the women was horrific, comparing them to chickens and cows. “Somebody’s got to think for the women and chillen and chickens and cows. God, they sho don't think none fo themselves.” Seriously enough to make you want to jump through the book and smack a man.

I can't recommend this classic enough. I would recommend the audio by Ruby Dee because she brought every line life and emotion. 

Part of this novel was a bit autobiographical. Hurston's dad was the mayor of Eatonville for a time. Here's a short crash course on Hurston:

I plan on digging more into the Harlem Renaissance as well:

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 I'm going to be honest. This was my 3rd attempt to get through Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.

And, much like watching Midnight Mass on Netflix, I am really glad I kept going! If you started Cloud Cuckoo Land and gave up (I can't be the only one, right??), then go back to it and keep going. When it all starts pulling together *chef's kiss*

My main sticking point was the really disparate stories: We had Anna in 1450's Constantinople, Omeir who was in the same era as Anna but outside the walls, Zeno - both the old version in 2020 in Idaho and the young version in the Korean War, Seymour in the same era as old Zeno, and Konstance who is hurtling through space in Mission Year 60+. 

What ends of tying these folks together? A story.

Anna, a young orphan, is curious and learns to read, but there is very little to read where she is at. An old teacher helps her learn Greek before he passes. Anna is also resourceful and can scurry in and out of places, stealing what she needs to survive. When her sister gets very sick, Anna takes to stealing books from an old rectory to sell to some Italians who are trying to conserve the written word.

"One bad-tempered abbot, the tall scribe said, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm - and all those centuries are undone. You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath."

Anna uses the money to take her sister to convent for a miracle (FYI: Mercury is not a miracle), but her sister gets sicker. When Anna discovers a small book, she takes it back to her sister and reads to her to calm her.  The story is Aethon and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Zeno in present day is an old man, 86 years old. He's survived a lot, including being a POW in the Korean War. His second story of his time in Korea as a POW shows us his start in learning Greek but it also shows us that Zeno is not a risk taker, something he laments at the end. But it's also something he rectifies when a risk is exactly what is needed. 

Zeno is encouraged by a fellow POW to do Greek translations. He is ok at it, until a small book from the 1400s is found, badly damaged and in need of translation. The story is Aethon and Cloud Cuckoo Land. Zeno works with children at the local library on a play of the translation and they are mid-rehearsal when Seymour comes in with a bomb.

Seymour is an atypical kid who struggles with sensory overload. He struggles with school, with people, with change. One thing he found to cling to is the destruction of the environment. A new housing addition springs up next to his trailer and his mom struggles to pay the bills, even while working 2 jobs. Seymour gets more obsessed with making people who destroy the environment pay, so he builds a bomb. Later on in his life, he dives into a translated story. Aethon and Cloud Cuckoo Land. He sets out to make his wrongs right.

Konstance is a 10 year old on the space ship Argos that is hurtling through space with a destination of Beta Oph2. She has never stepped on to Earth and will never leave the ship. She's 2nd generation on the ship and spends her time in the virtual library, wandering through old copies of Earth. When things get dire on the Argos, Konstance finds solace in the library in a story. The story is Aethon and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Omeir is a village boy with a cleft palate (declared a demon by the uninformed) who is something of an animal whisperer. He's recruited by the Sultan to bring his ox to help take over Constantinople. His path is painful and arduous but it eventually crosses with Anna, who had to flee Constantinople, and she tells him the story of Aethon and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

So many separate, yet wonderful, stories. As we get towards the end of the book, it felt like it all sped up. You can see the threads that bound all of these characters together and, even when you booed a character, you cheered them on in the end. So much suffering is endured. Those left behind must endure the bulk of it. In the end, the story of Aethon, the fool who wanted to be an owl and fly to Cloud Cuckoo Land, bound them all together.

I'm honestly astounded that Doerr brought this all together the way he did and that he did it so well. All The Light We Cannot See was fantastic. Cloud Cuckoo Land is just as fantastic.

Interview with the author