Review: Royal Tea Service

Royal Tea Service by Casey Blair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, this is not really a cozy fantasy, in the sense that it doesn't have low stakes. The protagonist is setting out to save the world, which is as high as stakes can get. But it has a lot of the furniture of cozy: a tea shop, a sweet romance, a lot of page space dedicated to the personal and interpersonal development of the characters rather than to the world-saving.

Don't start with this book, by the way. The books are based on a continuous web series, and so when a character from a previous book reappears there isn't the slightest attempt to recap who they are, what they do, or what their relationship to the protagonist is; you need to remember from having read the previous volumes relatively recently. And there are a lot of these characters, too.

I was pleased to note that one of my criticisms of the previous book is starting to be addressed in this one. Miyara the Tea Princess has been making everything about her, doing all the protagonism, and treating her friends and acquaintances largely as a little court who she orders about as extensions of herself. In this book, she's become aware of that and is trying to work on it, delegate more, trust them to do what they're good at in their own way without her direct supervision, and have their own development and growth. Because it's still narrated in her voice, inevitably everything still filters through her perspective, but at least she's encouraging more agency in the other characters, and they're taking it on.

One thing hasn't changed. One of her sisters says at one point, "I was under the impression that defeat by graciousness was your primary mode of operating." I have never been under that impression; to me, it seems that Miyara's primary mode of operating is to berate people with harsh truths and ultimatums until they fold and do what she wants, inexplicably without resenting her manner in most cases.

In terms of language, the sentences sometimes wander so much that they get lost and fall apart grammatically; there was one I couldn't parse at all, I assume because at least one of the words had the wrong part of speech. There are numerous missing words, repeated words, transposed words, and other errors and typos (including "knew" for "new," twice, and "their" for "there"; maybe the author uses dictation software and doesn't clean up the output properly?). A couple of times, Miyara claims to be the "fourth youngest" princess; she's actually fourth oldest, and therefore second youngest, of the five.

All up, I noted about twice as many errors as I'd expect to see in a book this length (it's long), which earned it my "seriously-needs-editing" tag. The author is being ambitious with the prose, attempting sentences that are long and complicated and profound, but doesn't have the chops to pull it off consistently. Apparently, the books were funded by a Kickstarter following success as a web series; more of the proceeds needed to be dedicated to competent professional editing.

In my reviews of the previous two books, I mentioned that the worldbuilding felt like scenery flats. Here, it feels a little more filled in, especially the magic systems. We do still get the occasional ritual recitation of 2020s US progressive orthodox doctrine on oppressive systems, with no attempt to make it feel like an organic part of the setting or something Miyara, with her background, would realistically think, but most of the thoughts that are actually integrated into the story are not so rote or simplistic and most of them make some sense. (I will note that ambassadors are not usually empowered to change the laws of their countries by making a treaty with other countries; their government still needs to ratify the treaty and make the changes to the law by their normal process.)

I'm being harsh on it, despite rating it highly, because it's a fresh and (from a story point of view) mostly well-executed premise that I felt was badly let down by lack of attention to detail. I would normally place a book with this amount of depth and character development in at least the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list, if not the Platinum tier, but as it is, it only merits Silver.

There's a sentence in there somewhere that I didn't highlight from Deniel, Miyara's love interest, about putting effort into your art to make it the best it can be. I feel like the author needs to put that sentence up on the wall and reflect on it deeply. This whole series shows a lot of promise that, for me, is not fully realized because of poor mechanics, mental blind spots and ignorance about how a world works. If the author (who is young and early-career) works hard on these things, rather than coasting on the popularity the good storytelling and strong characters deservedly attract, future books could be extraordinarily good, rather than a mixture of excellence and profound flaws.

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