Review: Tea With an Outlaw

Tea With an Outlaw by R.R. Orange
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third book I've read recently from Netgalley with "tea" in the title, none of which were all that cozy, and none of which I thought were particularly good, though this is the best of the three for my taste. It's more YA than I was expecting, in the sense of being quite simplistic and also focusing on the concerns of young adults, and the narrative arc seemed off even for that.

The protagonist is a young woman who's about to turn 18. She lives in a society where parents typically make decisions like who their offspring will marry, but rebels against this and wants to make her own decisions, like not marrying at all and becoming a flower mage instead. The problem is, she isn't as good at making decisions as she thinks she is, though the ones she makes are, it turns out, often better than if she had obediently gone along with her parents. She flip-flops around on some of her decisions, too, right up to the end of the book.

The outlaw of the title is a young nobleman, loyal to the young queen, who is being pursued by the Queen's Guard on the orders of a royal advisor who is trying to kill the queen with surprisingly slow-acting flower magic.

I say "surprisingly slow-acting" partly because the flower magic is quite powerful - in fact, all the magic is quite powerful, but it isn't Sandersonian (the reader doesn't know in advance what it can and can't do, so there's always the possibility that it can be used to resolve a situation in a way that's unexpected and unforeshadowed, and therefore less satisfying to the reader). The setting is partially fantasy Italian, though among all the Italianate names there are a couple of minor characters called Edith and Brian for some reason, and several of the more major characters have what seem to be made-up fantasy names.

The protagonist helps the outlaw to escape and joins his quest, along with her best friend the 17-year-old highly-skilled alchemist, who at one point casually whips up a teleportation spell because, after all, how hard can it be? They (and a couple of other villagers, aided sometimes by a local witch and the protagonist's flower-mage mentor) run around on the advice of various creatures, picking up magic and using it. I'll put the disappointing part in spoiler tags, but it has to do with narrative expectation. (view spoiler)[The main part of the quest is to get a berry that appears once every thousand years in order to save the queen, and when they manage to do this, relatively easily in the end, the protagonist uses it to save her mentor instead. This totally doesn't matter; they go to the palace and the antagonist immediately backs down and disappears, and getting rid of her inimical plants and saving the queen is super easy, barely an inconvenience. The protagonist then flip-flops a bit on whether she is, after all, going to marry her fellow villager who she had been dead set against marrying, but ends up going off on another quest with the former outlaw, with whom she has a mutual attraction - but they have decided not to pursue it because he's a noble and she's a peasant and it just wouldn't work out. (hide spoiler)] I got strong "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" vibes, and it just wasn't satisfying to me. What should have been difficult was easy, and what initially seemed important turned out to not be that important, and the protagonist didn't seem able to stick to a decision.

I gather that the author is not a native English speaker, but it doesn't show too much. There's the odd idiom that is slightly off, and some of the dialog punctuation doesn't quite follow convention, but I often see far worse from native speakers.

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