Review: A Coup of Tea

A Coup of Tea by Casey Blair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Enjoyable, despite a few (sometimes surprising) flaws.

It's presented as "cosy fantasy," implying that the stakes, while important to the main character, may not be "important" in any larger sense. And at first, that's what we get: a princess renounces her position and family in order to figure out who she is when she isn't letting everyone else define her, flees to the other end of the country, and (by happy coincidence, which fortunately was the only use of this plot device) ends up with a job at a tea shop.

It turns out that her extensive education in etiquette includes the Tea Ceremony, so she gets the idea of attempting to become a tea master. There are tea shop scenes, a sweet low-key romance, a cute cat, other women that she starts to befriend, and interactions with her boss where she uses her emotional intelligence to partially compensate for her extremely sheltered upbringing. (Among the several well-judged telling moments is one where she reflects that she knows the history and all the political wranglings involved in the design of each coin of the realm, but has never actually had occasion to use one.)

So far, it feels like one of those Japanese manga about a young woman in a service vocation largely just dealing with day-to-day life (especially since her name sounds Japanese, plus tea ceremony). As the story goes on, though, the stakes get higher: there's oppression going on against a refugee group (the term "structural inequality" gets thrown around a lot) and maybe the ex-princess can do something about it, if she risks everything?

The setting, unfortunately, is of the scenery-flats variety. I felt it was only just barely worked out enough to enable the plot. For example, there's never any definition of what magic can and can't do or how it works, enabling it to do whatever it needs to, and to provide analogues of contemporary technology like fridges, and also a train which seems to only exist so that she can get across the country in a day. There are occasional intrusions of right-now-this-minute US liberal concepts, like the aforesaid "structural inequality", without any attempt to make them feel organic to the setting. It feels like it's mashed up out of bits of traditional Japanese and contemporary American culture, with some on-the-fly fantasy elements papered hastily over the seams.

In the pre-publication copy I got from Netgalley for review, the editing is mostly good, apart from occasional missing words in sentences and a few surprisingly basic homonym errors. Hopefully they will be fixed before publication.

Setting aside these minor flaws, the character work is good, the plot is well constructed, there's an abundance of heart, and the occasional brief philosophical reflections actually have some depth to them. That last point would usually get a book up to five stars for me, but the rather shonky worldbuilding drags it down to the silver tier of my Best of the Year. That's still a recommendation.

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