Hi, hello friends! We hope you had a wonderful August, and September continues on being lovely. We’re so excited to announce that the tea party has a tie for 2 books this month, so we will be splitting our time between two books. The two books selected this month are FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA by Crystal Maldonado and THIS POISON HEART by Kalynn Bayron. The tea party will be reading FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA from September 1st through September 15th, and THIS POISON HEART from September 16th through the end of the month. We are so happy that these two books are our September reads, and we hope you are too!
FAT CHANCE, CHARLIE VEGA is one of Caitlyn’s favourite books of the year, so we are very excited to be reading it alongside the tea party.
Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard.
Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.
Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.
People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter.
But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing–he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her? UGHHH. Everything is now officially a MESS.
A sensitive, funny, and painful coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves.
Links for Fat Chance, Charlie Vega: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | IndieBound | Bookshop
Content Warnings for Fat Chance, Charlie Vega: Fataphobia, mentioned death of a parent, mentions of sex, underage drinking (chapter 13), racism, a strained relationship with a parent, diet culture, emotional abuse + manipulation
Our second book of the month is THIS POISON HEART by Kalynn Bayron! This book is fun, exciting, and will definitely fill your fantasy needs. We are so excited to be reading it alongside the tea party in the second half of September!
Darkness blooms in bestselling author Kalynn Bayron’s new contemporary fantasy about a girl with a unique and deadly power.
Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.
When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined–it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri’s unique family lineage.
When strangers begin to arrive on their doorstep, asking for tinctures and elixirs, Bri learns she has a surprising talent for creating them. One of the visitors is Marie, a mysterious young woman who Bri befriends, only to find that Marie is keeping dark secrets about the history of the estate and its surrounding community. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it . . . until a nefarious group comes after her in search of a rare and dangerous immortality elixir. Up against a centuries-old curse and the deadliest plant on earth, Bri must harness her gift to protect herself and her family.
From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes another inspiring and deeply compelling story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her.
Links for This Poison Heart: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Content Warnings for This Poison Heart: brief depictions of grief, mentions of adoption, murder, death of a parent, blood and gore, decapitation, dismemberment, strong language
We hope you enjoy reading along with us this month, and we cannot wait to start discussing with you all! Happy reading!
