This book is a magical love letter to the art of tea-making and food, about a girl who joins a competition to save her beloved sister’s life. It’s also about friendship, and political corruption, and it’s infused with Chinese culture and mythology. There are so many mouth-watering descriptions of food. Meat buns and soups and sticky rice cakes and sweet-and-sour fish and all sorts of desserts—jellies and cookies and pastries filled with red bean paste. I loved this book, for the most part, for its descriptiveness(not just of food, but of scenery and architecture as well), its pacing, its plot.
I wasn’t entirely convinced of a few things. Like Ning’s characterization. She frequently states that she feels like an outsider, and I was looking forward to a main character that struggled with interacting with others, but this is never really an issue. She makes friends with a family on the ferry to the capital Jia, immediately makes friends with another girl, then immediately after that gets along with a boy who shows her around. She kept mentioning how she felt like she didn’t belong, but she’s only ever treated badly by the rich and privileged, and gets along with everyone else.
There’s the romance, which was just okay, but I personally don’t like instalove. If you’re a fan of when the main female character and male character meet and it’s very apparent that there’s some attraction between them and that they’ll act on this attraction after only a handful of interactions, you’ll probably also like it in this book. Their relationship does take an interesting turn, though. I also really enjoyed the way things came together in the end... Looking forward to the sequel, especially after that cliffhanger ending.
I wasn’t entirely convinced of a few things. Like Ning’s characterization. She frequently states that she feels like an outsider, and I was looking forward to a main character that struggled with interacting with others, but this is never really an issue. She makes friends with a family on the ferry to the capital Jia, immediately makes friends with another girl, then immediately after that gets along with a boy who shows her around. She kept mentioning how she felt like she didn’t belong, but she’s only ever treated badly by the rich and privileged, and gets along with everyone else.
There’s the romance, which was just okay, but I personally don’t like instalove. If you’re a fan of when the main female character and male character meet and it’s very apparent that there’s some attraction between them and that they’ll act on this attraction after only a handful of interactions, you’ll probably also like it in this book. Their relationship does take an interesting turn, though. I also really enjoyed the way things came together in the end... Looking forward to the sequel, especially after that cliffhanger ending.