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Review: A Taste for Love by Jennifer Yen

For fans of Jenny Han, Jane Austen, and The Great British Baking Show, A Taste for Love, is a delicious rom com about first love, familial expectations, and making the perfect bao.

To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. Smart, kind, and pretty, she dreams big and never shies away from a challenge. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang’s traditional values, especially when it comes to dating.

The one thing mother and daughter do agree on is their love of baking. Mrs. Yang is the owner of Houston’s popular Yin & Yang Bakery. With college just around the corner, Liza agrees to help out at the bakery’s annual junior competition to prove to her mom that she’s more than her rebellious tendencies once and for all. But when Liza arrives on the first day of the bake-off, she realizes there’s a catch: all of the contestants are young Asian American men her mother has handpicked for Liza to date.

The bachelorette situation Liza has found herself in is made even worse when she happens to be grudgingly attracted to one of the contestants; the stoic, impenetrable, annoyingly hot James Wong. As she battles against her feelings for James, and for her mother’s approval, Liza begins to realize there’s no tried and true recipe for love.

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Blog Tour + Spotlight: I Think I Love You by Auriane Desombre

Emma is a die-hard romantic. She loves a meet-cute Netflix movie, her pet, Lady Catulet, and dreaming up the Gay Rom Com of her heart for the film festival competition she and her friends are entering. If only they’d listen to her ideas. . .

Sophia is pragmatic. She’s big into boycotts, namely 1) relationships, 2) teen boys and their BO (reason #2347683 she’s a lesbian), and 3) Emma’s nauseating ideas. Forget starry-eyed romance, Sophia knows what will win: an artistic film with a message.

Cue the drama. The movie is doomed before they even start shooting . . . until a real-life plot twist unfolds behind the camera when Emma and Sophia start seeing each other through a different lens. Suddenly their rivalry is starting to feel like an actual rom-com.

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ARC Review: Accidentally Engaged by Farah Heron

Reena Manji doesn’t love her career, her single status, and most of all, her family inserting themselves into every detail of her life. But when caring for her precious sourdough starters, Reena can drown it all out. At least until her father moves his newest employee across the hall–with hopes that Reena will marry him.

But Nadim’s not like the other Muslim bachelors-du-jour that her parents have dug up. If the Captain America body and the British accent weren’t enough, the man appears to love eating her bread creations as much as she loves making them. She sure as hell would never marry a man who works for her father, but friendship with a neighbor is okay, right? And when Reena’s career takes a nosedive, Nadim happily agrees to fake an engagement so they can enter a couples video cooking contest to win the artisan bread course of her dreams.

As cooking at home together brings them closer, things turn physical, but Reena isn’t worried. She knows Nadim is keeping secrets, but it’s fine— secrets are always on the menu where her family is concerned. And her heart is protected… she’s not marrying the man. But even secrets kept for self preservation have a way of getting out, especially when meddling parents and gossiping families are involved. 

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Let’s Talk: Mary Reads Books like The Night Circus

Hi, hello! If you didn’t know, I really love The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I can’t really put into words why I love it so much, but it’s my all time favourite book, and I comfort read it a lot: it’s super special to me. The only problem is, I am always looking for a book that feels just as special and magical as this one. While The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern meets the criteria, I’m always on the hunt for other books that are similar. 

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Blog Tour + Review: Like Home by Louisa Onomé

Fans of Netflix’s On My Block, In the Heights, and readers of Elizabeth Acevedo and Ibi Zoboi will love this debut novel about a girl whose life is turned upside down after one local act of vandalism throws her relationships and even her neighborhood into turmoil.

Chinelo, or Nelo as her best friend Kate calls her, is all about her neighborhood Ginger East. She loves its chill vibe, ride-or-die sense of community, and her memories of growing up there. Ginger East isn’t what it used to be, though. After a deadly incident at the local arcade, all her closest friends moved away, except for Kate. But as long as they have each other, Nelo’s good.

Only, Kate’s parents’ corner store is vandalized, leaving Nelo shaken to her core. The police and the media are quick to point fingers, and soon more of the outside world descends on Ginger East with promises to “fix” it. Suddenly, Nelo finds herself in the middle of a drama unfolding on a national scale.

Worse yet, Kate is acting strange. She’s pushing Nelo away at the exact moment they need each other most. Nelo’s entire world is morphing into something she hates, and she must figure out how to get things back on track or risk losing everything⁠—and everyone⁠—she loves.

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Spotlight: The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier

The fifteen stories in The Loss of All Lost Things explore the unpredictable ways in which characters negotiate, experience, and manage various forms of loss. These characters lose loved ones; they lose their security and self-worth; they lose children; they lose their ability to hide and shield their emotions; they lose their reputations, their careers, their hometowns, and their life savings. Often depicting the awkward moments when characters are torn between decision and outcome, The Loss of All Lost Things focuses on moments of regret and yearning.

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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

Book Recs: 7 Books to read when you’ve got the travel bug

As America is now well into its 11th month (!!!) of quarantine, I am currently having all of the wanderlust feelings. In non-COVID times, I didn’t have much time to travel with my work schedule. The extent of my travel consisted of weekend or week-long trips to visit my best friend in NYC a few times a year, or some day trips around Northern California. I love adventures and trying new things, and discovering new places, and while I’ve always had the desire to travel, I’ve been feeling it extra intensely lately. Though I can’t physically hop on a train or a plane and visit some new place, I can read about it which has definitely helped with this restlessness that I’ve been feeling. If you’ve also got the travel bug here are 7 books that you should read!

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ARC Review: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

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.

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