Review: Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop (Roselle Lim)

Title: Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop
Series: standalone
Author: Roselle Lim
Publisher: Berkley
US Release Date: August 4, 2020
Genre: Adult Contemporary Magic Realism Romance
Content Rating: Teen (kissing, adult situations, car accident)
Format Read: ARC
Find On: Goodreads
Purchase: Indiebound | B&N | BookDepo | Azon
Summary:

Become enamored with the splendor of Paris in this heartwarming and delightful story about writing one’s own destiny and finding love along the way.

Vanessa Yu never wanted to see people’s fortunes—or misfortunes—in tea leaves.

Ever since she can remember, Vanessa Yu has been able to see people’s fortunes at the bottom of their teacups. To avoid blurting out their fortunes, she converts to coffee, but somehow fortunes escape and find a way to complicate her life and the ones of those around her. To add to this plight, her romance life is so nonexistent that her parents enlist the services of a matchmaking expert from Shanghai.

The day before her matchmaking appointment, Vanessa accidentally sees her own fate: death by traffic accident. She decides that she can’t truly live until she can find a way to get rid of her uncanny abilities. When her eccentric aunt, Evelyn, shows up with a tempting offer to whisk her away, Vanessa says au revoir to America and bonjour to Paris. While working at Evelyn’s tea stall at a Parisian antique market, Vanessa performs some matchmaking of her own, attempting to help reconnect her aunt with a lost love. As she learns more about herself and the root of her gifts, she realizes one thing to be true: knowing one’s destiny isn’t a curse, but being unable to change it is.

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Review copy provided by publisher for honest review. Thank you, Berkley!

With its promise of fortune-telling magic and romance in picturesque France, I just couldn't resist giving Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop a try, even though I'm not usually one for adult contemporary romances (due to sexual content). But while the story was light, the content clean, and the end happy, I unfortunately did not enjoy this book as I'd hoped.

My biggest problem, which tainted everything else, was the writing. And my biggest problem with the writing was the description. Vanessa was a privileged woman who reveled in the finer things in life, so much of the book was excessive description of the high-class food, fashion, art and architecture she relished. An abundance of detail can bring a story to life, but here, because all the topics were so commonplace to Vanessa, the description was loaded down with specific terms and proper names that felt like they were supposed to be obvious but to a layperson like me were typically not. I did recognize some of it, but most was lost on me and, because it made up so much of the book all the extravagant description quickly became irritating. The teen travel romances I've enjoyed in the past made me long to visit their cultured locations and eat their delectable offerings, but Vanessa's experiences left me uninterested or put off by the more complicated sights and tastes of her overseas adventure.

And then there were the characters. Partially due to the erratic writing style, all of the characters were generally flat and wildly inconsistent - especially protagonist Vanessa. Her logic made little to no sense most of the time, and I was repelled by her selfish and stubborn personality as she fought against her unwanted gift and the instruction she was generously offered, multiple times, to help her master it. And then to have the story very randomly reward her bad behavior... But more on that in a minute. Her reasons for fighting against her gift - bad predictions about others that made her feel bad, and her inability to sustain a romance without a prediction ruining it - were childish with no sense of responsibility despite her adult age and strong roots in supportive family. I would've understood if this was a Young Adult book about a teenager, but as an adult peer I had no sympathy for her.

And then there was the story itself. Contrary to the title's claim, the tea shop did not belong to Vanessa but to her aunt, and very little time was spent there. I expected a tea shop owned by Vanessa where magical things happened, but instead it was little more than an unmagical backdrop for a handful of scenes. This was disappointing and created a loss of trust that the story never earned back as it was just as inconsistent and illogical as the characters. The plot even went so far as to drop a deus ex machina into the middle of the book that twisted the situation to Vanessa's selfish favor and despite being ridiculous was immediately accepted by all as a logical occurrence embraced without question. Instead of a story about Vanessa learning responsibility and how to control her power while she traveled and fell in love, it became a pampered woman's empowerment as she finally got everything she wanted while learning very little. This made for an impractical and unrelatable story that left me feeling underwhelmed and honestly a little disgusted.

So did I enjoy anything about Vanessa Yu? Well, it was refreshingly clean for an adult contemporary romance, with little more than a few passionate kisses and little to no language, which is always appreciated. I also found the magical gifts interesting with their predictions and red threads of fate, although Vanessa's occasional unexplained "visions" were weird and flowery. And despite heavier emotions the story was generally light even at its darkest moments (this may have been due to the flat writing, though), with everyone getting their (albeit unrealistic) happily ever after at the end, my usual preference where romances are concerned.

Conclusion: Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop was a lighthearted contemporary of magic and romance that I unfortunately did not like due to the misleading title, flat writing, irritating description, inconsistent and selfish main character, and disappointing story. I did appreciate its clean content and happy ending, but otherwise there was disappointingly little I enjoyed about the book. That said, I'd still easily recommend it for female romance lovers as a summer beach read, but only if they are a serious foodie who has a working knowledge and interest in fashion, art, architecture, and France.

Scribble Rating: 

2.5 of 5 Scribbles

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