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!
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