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  • (Review) Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

    From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to All on Tue Apr 16 13:06:56 2024
    Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne

    An underappreciated bodyguard casts her current career aside in favour
    of romance and small-town entrepreneurship, thus earning the
    incandescent fury of her absolute monarch ex-boss.

    https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/tea-for-two
    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
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  • From John Savard@21:1/5 to All on Wed Apr 17 15:54:19 2024
    On 16 Apr 2024 13:06:56 -0000, jdnicoll@panix.com (James Nicoll)
    wrote:

    Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne

    An underappreciated bodyguard casts her current career aside in favour
    of romance and small-town entrepreneurship, thus earning the
    incandescent fury of her absolute monarch ex-boss.

    https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/tea-for-two

    Sounds like a wonderful read, but I would have preferred it if the
    author had plugged a few obvious plot holes.

    You are absolutely correct th at a bookstore that also serves tea is
    not a viable business model in a world in which the printing press
    hadn't been invented yet. So, if, instead, the printing press had been invented, but the absolute monarch decreed that possession of a book
    printed on one was a capital crime - which didn't worry the
    protagonists who mistakenly thought they had run far enough away -
    then the book would have made sense.

    As being imitative of another recently successful book - well, if
    people could get knock-offs of Star Wars or Star Trek right, readers
    or viewers wouldn't complain. Similarly with Tarzan of the Apes or
    Lord of the Rings.

    John Savard

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  • From John Savard@21:1/5 to quadibloc@servername.invalid on Wed Apr 17 16:10:30 2024
    On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:54:19 -0600, John Savard
    <quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:

    As being imitative of another recently successful book - well, if
    people could get knock-offs of Star Wars or Star Trek right, readers
    or viewers wouldn't complain. Similarly with Tarzan of the Apes or
    Lord of the Rings.

    I was going to try a humorous follow-up to this post as well, but the
    best I could come up with was "Star of the Unborn" by Franz Werfel,
    which is an obscure, rather than wildly popular, work, so the fact
    that its title seems to combine two categories of titles of successful franchises doesn't really help...

    However, among my search results was "Star of the Sea", which turns
    out to be an epithet for an individual well-loved by Roman Catholics.

    So in a world where "Star of the Galaxy" is a novel about an
    adventurous female space pilot... who suddenly finds herself pregnant
    without having done anything to deserve it... and then the novel
    becomes a Dune knock-off after the child grows up...

    assuming the book was successful instead of being thrown on the
    rubbish heap and generally regarded as highly offensive to boot in
    addition to being badly written...

    John Savard

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  • From John Savard@21:1/5 to quadibloc@servername.invalid on Wed Apr 17 16:22:45 2024
    On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:10:30 -0600, John Savard
    <quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:

    and then the novel
    becomes a Dune knock-off after the child grows up...

    But since the novel's title means that she, and not her son, is the
    primary protagonist... presumably, it will need to be structured like
    this:

    Act I: Her character, as a female Han Solo, is established;
    Act II: Her son, of mysterious origin, becomes a messianic figure on a
    troubled planet;
    Act III: Mommy steps in and puts a stop to this nonsens, finding a way
    for the oppressed people of said planet to gain their freedom without
    plunging the galaxy into war.

    That would even make it less of a Dune knock-off.

    John Savard

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