I found out that A Tempest of Tea was coming out a few weeks before its publication date, and upon being presented with the keywords “vampires”, “heist”, and “tea”, I immediately requested the e-book from my library. Then, I spent the waiting period perusing Hafsah Faizal’s TikTok to find out more about the book. She described it as “Peaky Blinders meets a dash of King Arthur with vampires and a heist”, which to me sounded pretty unusual and interesting. I was suddenly very curious as to how she managed to fit all these themes together in a coherent way. Spoiler: she did not.
My entire reading experience of A Tempest of Tea consisted of dragging myself through the long and boring parts, but mostly of thinking over and over “this book is a marketing ploy.” At its very core, the story is eerily similar to Six of Crows with a bunch of appealing elements sprinkled on top: vampires (they mostly hang out in the background) and King Arthur (Arthie, the main character, has a pistol named Calibore, whose backstory mirrors that of Excalibur). Arthie and her brother Jin run a tea shop called Spindrift, like the American brand, which made me think the whole time that they were sipping on fruity sparkling water – but maybe that’s on me. The thing about the tea shop is that other than serving as an excuse for Arthie and Jin to plan a heist, and as a place where vampires hang out afterhours, it does not come up throughout the story that much.
Overall, the book felt “tropey”, and the tropes stood out too much for me to ignore them even if I was enjoying the narrative – which I wasn’t. I struggled to connect with such underdeveloped characters, and once I realized the parallels with Six of Crows , I couldn’t help thinking about how much those characters meant to me and how I was on the edge of my seat for fear that something would happen to them. In this book, the stakes are almost as high, but my attachment to the characters was lacking. Even the relationships between the characters feel fabricated. Attraction and romance do not naturally develop; rather, characters are slotted into romantic arcs, it seems, to fit an imaginary requirement. On a technical level, there was too much exposition and not enough action, which hurts a narrative where action is supposed to drive the story forward. As a direct result, pacing was off. Most of the brief chapters preceding the heist could have been summarized with a “And thus, they waited.” Instead, the reader has to sit through a handful of variations of that same sentence. At that point of the book, I was desperate for something, anything, to happen.
My entire reading experience of A Tempest of Tea consisted of dragging myself through the long and boring parts, but mostly of thinking over and over “this book is a marketing ploy.” At its very core, the story is eerily similar to Six of Crows with a bunch of appealing elements sprinkled on top: vampires (they mostly hang out in the background) and King Arthur (Arthie, the main character, has a pistol named Calibore, whose backstory mirrors that of Excalibur). Arthie and her brother Jin run a tea shop called Spindrift, like the American brand, which made me think the whole time that they were sipping on fruity sparkling water – but maybe that’s on me. The thing about the tea shop is that other than serving as an excuse for Arthie and Jin to plan a heist, and as a place where vampires hang out afterhours, it does not come up throughout the story that much.
Overall, the book felt “tropey”, and the tropes stood out too much for me to ignore them even if I was enjoying the narrative – which I wasn’t. I struggled to connect with such underdeveloped characters, and once I realized the parallels with Six of Crows , I couldn’t help thinking about how much those characters meant to me and how I was on the edge of my seat for fear that something would happen to them. In this book, the stakes are almost as high, but my attachment to the characters was lacking. Even the relationships between the characters feel fabricated. Attraction and romance do not naturally develop; rather, characters are slotted into romantic arcs, it seems, to fit an imaginary requirement. On a technical level, there was too much exposition and not enough action, which hurts a narrative where action is supposed to drive the story forward. As a direct result, pacing was off. Most of the brief chapters preceding the heist could have been summarized with a “And thus, they waited.” Instead, the reader has to sit through a handful of variations of that same sentence. At that point of the book, I was desperate for something, anything, to happen.