I should have known. But the teal spredges on Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea #1) got me. But there was the kinda cringe-y title and the AI-looking, too-modern illustration inside the front cover. And there was the okay rating, my friend warning me about the “clunky” writing. And the event I attended where I was not impressed by this author’s reading. But after the failed read of The Book Club Hotel and the very successful read of The Geographer’s Map to Romance, I wanted to explore more cozies. This is one of the classics of the very-new-genre of cozy. It is also a self-pubbed/BookTok success story. So, I’m going to do my best to be kind.

Synopsis: Reyna is not just any queen’s-guard, she’s a very successful and dedicated queen’s-guard, in the family business for life. However, the queen really sucks. And Reyna’s girlfriend has made a proposal: run away and open a book and tea shop, somewhere the queen will never find them. Then again, Reyna’s girlfriend, Kianthe, is the head mage of, like, the world, and no one’s going to let her walk away from her life that easy, either. Is there any universe in which two lovebirds can find a friendly neighborhood to light up a hearth for and not be tracked down and dragged back to their lives–or death sentences?

The best way for me to be nice, here, is to be brief.

And let’s begin with the pro-side of my experience reading this book. I kept waking up—sometimes in the middle of the night—planning cafe menus. That’s where it started. The midnight wakefulness eventually became story-planning for my own cozy. Who knows if that will ever go anywhere, but I have sketched out some beginning chapters and filled a notes file. I don’t like missing sleep, but I love to be inspired. You could say that Can’t Spell Tea Without Treason inspired me. And that’s a good thing.

On the other hand— The writing had me lost at times and despairing at others. Nothing a real thorough edit couldn’t fix (if we’re being optimistic). By that I mean both a line edit and also a story-level edit. Since I’m being nice and brief, I’ll give you just a couple examples, one of which I arbitrarily decided to track. Skin tones. The skin tones given in the book as descriptors for new characters are, and I quote, drying clay (take a second and let that sink in), cloudy quartz (hmm…), cool chestnut (I rejoiced at the chestnut but was baffled by the “cool”), and waterlogged driftwood. I almost liked the last one until it occurred to me that, like the first one, there is a wide range in the color of driftwood (and clay). Then we rounded it off with warm ochre. Again, this one almost had me interested but have you ever googled the color ochre? As a painter, I thought I knew it as a yellow (which would make a kinda wild skin tone). Turns out, it can be yellow, brown, or red. Sigh. I’m being funny (or trying to be). This is a pretty small thing, but it is emblematic of the issues on each page, in basically every sentence.

I tried to do the thing that I did with Godkiller, where I turned off my inner critic and skimmed-slash-plowed through any obstacles. But I found that I couldn’t do that as easily here. There just wasn’t enough stable ground to keep walking steady. There is a part of me that wants to dive in and give this a Land of Stories-level critique. (I ripped that series a new one.) Or Cassandra Clare. (Oh yeah, I have been avoiding writing that one for a couple years.) But the issues with Clare—even though hers was a fanfic-to-page journey which would seem more similar to Thorne—have a different feel. Thorne’s problems are more akin to the grammatical and logical and stylistic issues that arose in Colfer’s books.

I’ll just list a few problems. Though the POV jumps every-other-chapter between Reyna and Kianthe, it often hops to universal and into the wrong head. In a move that probably just shows some inexperience, Thorne uses lots of signifiers for her main characters besides their names and pronouns, like “the girlfriend,” “her partner,” “the mage,” etc. There are inconsistencies. Nonsensical descriptors. Wild leaps of both logic and character emotion. Way more telling than showing. And if Reyna or Kianthe laughed, giggled, or chortled one more time to indicate to me that something was funny (when it totally wasn’t), I might have thrown the book across the room. (In short, writing style/ability and unbelievability.)

I will stop while I still can.

The series is:

• Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea
• A Pirate’s Life for Tea
• Tea You at the Altar
• Alchemy and a Cup of Tea

Note: I was really looking forward to the pirate stage of this series, but there is not really a universe where I continue reading it.

I predict that this book and the rest of the series will keep snagging fans, some of them really devoted (though I’m not the only one pooping on this party). For one, cozies are big stuff, and this is cozy romantasy, romantasy also being big stuff. I can appreciate what Thorne was doing for the genre, providing a niche thing for an audience that was ripe for it. And for two, it’s sapphic, and there is a voracious audience out there for that. So, if you are looking for your next cozy romantasy sapphic read and somehow haven’t yet read Tomes & Tea yet, you will want to consider this series. But maybe find a sample of the first few pages or even stand there in the bookstore and give the first couple chapters a read. If you are fine with “clunky” writing and the breaking of all the rules (which are there for good reasons), then maybe you’ll be like, “This slow-paced, surface-level story involving tea, tomes (not books, never books), gryphons (spelled griffins, which is acceptable but just not what I’m used to seeing), and dragons is gonna be fine for your evening reading. If it turns out you were wrong about it, at least you might wake up in the wee sma’s with your brain trying to correct it and therefore gifting you with yet another novel idea (that quite frankly you didn’t need).