Review: Tea Set and Match

Tea Set and Match by Casey Blair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here is, in part, what I wrote about the first book in this series:

"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... There are occasional intrusions of right-now-this-minute US liberal concepts... 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."

All of that very much still applies in this second book, and for me is by far its biggest flaw, though there are also a number of careless typos (like "wide" for "side") and consistent misspellings (like "borne" when it means "birthed" rather than "carried," and "leant" when it means "loaned" and not "leaned"). Also, some missing question marks, and hyphens where they shouldn't be.

This lack of attention to key elements of execution drags it down from the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list, where the originality and reflective depth would have placed it, to the Bronze tier, meaning only just a recommendation. But if you don't care about plausible worldbuilding and don't notice mechanical fumbles, this is a warm-hearted, sometimes profound and overall enjoyable book.

I have to say, though, I did grow a little tired of Miyara, the tea princess, tearing into someone in what seems like a highly judgmental and confrontational way (presumably mitigated by her always calm formal tone, but it was hard not to read it as bitter and accusing) and, rather than making an enemy for life, instead forcing them to confront their own issues and end up doing whatever it is she wants them to do so that she can continue to save all the less-powerful people from her position of privilege. She is a little too perfect and successful, and her role as a catalyst in bringing everyone together (which she several times remarks on) makes everything about her. So far, it's not quite so irritating that I don't want to read the third book in the series, because there are some definite strengths here that I don't often see, but I'm slowly cooling on it.

Because it started as a web series and is only now being reformatted as three books, there's a lack of what I call "previously-on" to reorient the reader to the events and people of the first book. I did manage to remember who everyone was relatively quickly, which is not so much a tribute to their characterization as to how strongly they are related to the main character; it was those relationships, not their personal qualities, that I mostly remembered. But if it had been longer since I'd read the previous book (I read it three months ago), I would have struggled.

In summary, then, a book with considerable strengths balanced by equally considerable flaws, with the potential to be much better given a bit of work.

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