Here’s the tea…

Review – A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal

3.5 on the Bookter scale.

PSA: Spoilers, big ones, abound, so read with caution. And I promise to keep my SJM mentions to a minimum.

I was very much looking forward to this book, I will admit – vampires, plus I really enjoyed the Sands of Arawiya duology, so buying was more or less a no-brainer for me.

For the most part, I was not disappointed.

There are multiple things that Hafsah Faizal does right, and really well. First, I think the concepts that she comes up with for her stories are pretty cool without being bogged down with tons of details. They’re also atmospheric without, again, getting bogged down with pages of description.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, she fills a niche (YA Fantasy stories features persons of color) that has historically been lacking but seems to be making ground in recent years – that never once veers into tokenism. And that’s coming from a white person who fancies herself pretty good at knowing when she’s being pandered to.

“A Tempest of Tea” features a proverbial rainbow coalition of a cast and never once gives the reader the impression that the author was sitting there with a list of cultures to tick off. That’s unfortunately something I’ve had the misfortune of reading more than once in books I’ve otherwise liked (The Bargainer Series by Laura Thalassa) and books I’ve considered trash even before they got to the racially offensive material (Throne of Glass by You-Know-Who).

I can’t say whether this authenticity is due to Faizal’s being a POC herself or because she’s just a good writer, but I think I’m safe in assuming that it’s probably both. I understand and respect white authors not writing stories they shouldn’t (i.e. anything concerning racism) but that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t feature POC in your works in ways that don’t touch tokenism. I.e. you can make a supporting character black/asian/etc. without having to construct a discrimination subplot around said character OR needing to use stereotypically POC vernacular (Temper in The Bargainer is an unfortunate example of this) in their dialogue lines.

All of which is to say it’s cool and important that stuff like this is being done.

That said, the story here was certainly interesting on its own merits. To put it frankly, this is very much a multi-cultural Six of Crows with vampires. The Dregs crew there certainly had members from multiple backgrounds, but that theme of being a minority (in multiple ways) was much more prevalent here. And that’s not to say that Six of Crows created the mold for supernatural teenage heist stories, but it certainly is the benchmark by which any subsequent book should be judged.

So….heist, vampires, loads of romantic elements, a little magic thrown in, and all of it happening in the shadow of a tea house that’s a front for a blood den (cool concept, btw). These are all elements that I have historically loved, but the book lacked in some pretty big places for me.

First, Arthie, our main character. She is brash, fierce, independent, strong, and multiple men love her for it. How do we know this? We are reminded. Multiple times. I love a strong female character as much as anyone does, and I love that there are characters out there that are breaking both cultural and gender norms (Arthie favors suits over dresses), but the reader keeps getting hammered with the fact that Arthie is not like other girls that we venture into…not like other girls territory, which is an unfortunate byproduct of a metric ton of YA fantasy books these days and probably could be dismissed as the inevitable trade-off for having so many female-centric books. It’s more a personal pet peeve and annoyance of mine, and honestly pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

A bigger offense, in my humble opinion, is that the amount of twists and false endings this book had left my head spinning. Surprises are awesome, but not when you’ve got like four or five in as many pages, and not when there was literally no foreshadowing, or so little that it is easily missed (I plan on doing a subsequent listen on audiobook as sometimes it’s easier for my ADHD brain to catch things like that when I can hear them as opposed to see them).

Spoilers below the drop:

Arthie is a half vampire, and has been hiding it from her bestie Jin, the audience, and everyone for pretty much ever. I am not sure what purpose this whole big revelation served in terms of the story other than to shock. We had already established that human-seeming Arthie is a badass, and nothing she did to establish her badassery was dependent on any benefits of vampirism.

Then Matteo appears to be a double crosser, but it’s really Laith, and then the dumbest part to me, the Ram turns out to be Flick’s mom. Which, yay, woman power because supervillainous dictators can have Y chromosomes too, except….it was so anti-climactic. We barely see Flick’s mother, as she’s referred to more than she is talked to directly, and that big reveal was just…oh, okay. Technically, yes, it is a surprise, but more in the way where you get a vacuum from your husband for your birthday instead of jewelry (unless you explicitly ask for a Dyson cordless as I did one year).

Oh, and Jin is shot dead and he gets turned, and then Archie’s secret vampire mentor is killed with her magical pistol, which turns about to be from Arawiya (nice touch there, and that’s how you tie separate series together, with subtle, little touches, not the jackhammer approach taken by You-Know-Who).

So, a lot of stuff happened, but so much of it happened in the last few chapters that I barely had time to appreciate it before the book was over.

The cliffhanger is small, which is not surprising given that Faizal literally threw every surprise that made even nominal sense at the reader in a very small space, but it does make me wonder what is left for the next book.

This may seem like I’m ragging on it, and I’m not. This is leagues better than a lot of the stuff that gets published in this era of You-Know-Who. And even where it is formulaic (love triangles, a nlog’s heroine) it’s more palatable because the backdrop isn’t entirely run of the mill. Yes, vampires have been done to death (hardy har), but they’re not seen as frequently as fae, or werewolves, or hideous sewer monsters that were supposed to like reading about people having sex with because their wieners are big. If I could be allowed to compare this to Six of Crows again, I would say it (and the city it’s set in) is like a pastel-colored version of Ketterdam. There’s evil and monsters afoot, but you’re much more apt to go out for a cup of tea with them than you are someone like Pekka Rollins or that asshole head Fjerdan Grisha hater guy (sorry, brain fart).

Bottom line – read it. It’s fun, interesting, there’s a hot vampire guy and cute little kitten, and at least the author treats her audience as if they are deserving of a story that isn’t just soft-core porn interspersed with scenes of talking. I will not be surprised if I wind up rounding up that half star after I get the audiobook done.