teatimelit

teatimereads April Pick: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

We’re incredibly stoked to announce our April book for teatimereads — Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers. With a beautifully written coming-of-age story, lyrical storytelling, and witty millennial humor, we couldn’t be more excited that the tea party has chosen Honey Girl for our April pick! 

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Links for Honey Girl: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indie Bound

Content Warnings: discussion and depictions of mental illness, self-harm (scratching skin, nails digging into skin as an anxiety coping mechanism, cutting), past suicide attempt by a side character, anti-Blackness, racism, homophobia, casual alcohol consumption, minor drug use (marijuana), mentions of war, PTSD, past parent death (side character), grief, medical talk, self-destructive behavior, police, amputation (chapter 4) 

To find out more about teatimereads please click here. You can also join the server by accessing this link! 

Happy reading! 

teatimereads March Pick: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

We’re incredibly excited to announce our March book for teatimereads — Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which has been on our radar since before its January release. We couldn’t be more excited to join Lily in 1954 Chinatown. For Last Night at the Telegraph Club, we highly recommend reading it with a cup of jasmine tea by your side! 

“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Trigger warnings: abandonment, parental abuse, family trauma, sexism, misogyny, racism, racial slurs, deportation, death of a loved one, homophobia, internalized homophobia, miscarriage, police brutality

Links for Last Night at the Telegraph Club: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indiebound

teatimereads February Pick: A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow by Laura Taylor Namey

We’re incredibly excited to announce our February book for teatimereads — A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow.  With a beautifully written tale about the 3 F’s (family, friends, and food), grief, and an incredibly sweet romance, and you guessed it, tea, we couldn’t be more excited to have chosen A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow for our February pick! We highly recommend you settle in with a warm cup of Vanilla Black (you’ll find out why when you read the book), English Breakfast or a London Fog, paired with some good snacks. 

For Lila Reyes, a summer in England was never part of the plan. The plan was 1) take over her abuela’s role as head baker at their panadería, 2) move in with her best friend after graduation, and 3) live happily ever after with her boyfriend. But then the Trifecta happened, and everything—including Lila herself—fell apart.

Worried about Lila’s mental health, her parents make a new plan for her: Spend three months with family friends in Winchester, England, to relax and reset. But with the lack of sun, a grumpy inn cook, and a small town lacking Miami flavor (both in food and otherwise), what would be a dream trip for some feels more like a nightmare to Lila…until she meets Orion Maxwell.

A teashop clerk with troubles of his own, Orion is determined to help Lila out of her funk, and appoints himself as her personal tour guide. From Winchester’s drama-filled music scene to the sweeping English countryside, it isn’t long before Lila is not only charmed by Orion, but England itself. Soon a new future is beginning to form in Lila’s mind—one that would mean leaving everything she ever planned behind.

Content Warnings: family member death, breakups (friendship & romantic), mental health issues, grief, and dementia. 

Links for A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow:  Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indie Bound 

To find out more about teatimereads please click here. You can also join the server by accessing this link! 

Happy reading!

teatimereads January Pick: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

We’re super excited to announce that our first book club pick for teatimereads is Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights! As you know, Caitlyn and Cossette adored this book, and we couldn’t be happier to take our traveling tea party to 1926 Shanghai. 

The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.

A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.

But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

Trigger warnings: Mentions and descriptions of blood, violence, gore, character deaths, transphobia, explicit description of gouging self (not of their own volition), murder, weapon use, insects, alcohol consumption, parental abuse. 

Links for These Violent Delights:  Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indie Bound 

To find out more about teatimereads please click here. You can also join the server by accessing this link! 

Happy reading! 

Introducing: teatimereads

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice asks “And what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?” Over the years, we’ve come to find out there’s a lot of use in books, regardless of whether they consist of pictures or not. While teatimelit is only two months old, we’ve found a lot of joy in writing formal blog posts with recommendations and thoughts of our own, as well as making friends in the book blogging community and other bookish communities. 

In our earliest group chat days, the three of us would each take turns picking and choosing a book for the group to read and discuss each month. It’s always been a lovely thing, messaging each other our thoughts over a nice cup of tea. Through that book club, we’ve gotten to read books that we wouldn’t have heard about or read on our own, including books that have come to mean a lot to us. In reflecting on our bookish adventures, we decided to revamp our love for our book club, and expand it to be an official thing!

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve decided to create a book club for teatimelit named teatimereads, where we’ll select a diverse read to read each month & discuss it together! We’re incredibly excited for our new adventure, and to see what all the tea party attendees will choose for our first book! If you’d like to join us down the rabbit hole, just click on this link!