🍂☕ A Cup of Tea - November 2024 📚🍂

🦃 Happy Month-to-Eat-All-the-Things Peeps! 🦃

Don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the day when we embrace that most hobbity of traditions and sit down to the bountiful harvest before us without judgment for going back for thirds and fourths. (Come on now, pretty sure we all at least go for seconds!)

Glorious sustenance aside, this is also the month to reflect upon the good harvests in all areas of our lives this year, and to express our thanks, so with absolute sincerity, I want to say THANK YOU to all of you! You’ve made my new place here on Substack feel like home, and I appreciate every single one of you.

Now on to the bookish goods!

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🍂🐸 November Cup of Tea Book Club Pick 🐸🍂

This month I’ve gone with a reread for me and one I’ve been so anxious to share with friends, Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer! This is a cozy, mischievous fantasy with a grumpy/sunshine dynamic between the two main characters and includes a cast of quirky and endearing side characters. The main character Evie accidentally falls into being a villain’s assistant, and turns out, she’s pretty good at it! Also, her boss is good-looking and has an intriguing pet frog that talks with a sign.

As always, it's never too late to join us in the discussion, so grab your favorite cuppa and come hang out via Substack or Patreon!

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☕📚 Books I Read in October 📚☕

I only got around to finishing one book last month, which was last month’s book club pick, Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. Now, I’m going to say something possibly controversial here… the movie was better. 😱 (Gasp!) I know, but hear me out.

This doesn’t mean I hated the book, but it does mean my expectations weren’t met. Like Jaws, I think the film took the best nuggets from the book and made them into a more cohesive and enjoyable whole. Now because I did see the film first, I am willing to admit that it skewed my perception of the book. Aside from one really great scene in the beginning with Sally and some black cats, there was far less magic than I’d expected, and without that magic, it read like your run-of-the-mill family drama fiction. Which let me be clear there’s nothing wrong if you like those kinds of stories, there are certainly a few out there I have liked (The Joy Luck Club comes to mind), this one just wasn’t my cup of tea.

The more glaring grievances I have with the book though are the structure and the character arcs. I didn’t really mind so much that the book was split into 4 chapters of about 50 pages each, but this formatting combined with the writing style made each chapter feel like one long run-on sentence at times. The characters also had very little growth. This probably was caused by the fact that we kept bouncing around between the sisters Gillian and Sally as well as Sally’s daughters and covered decades of time.

The romances also did not make as much sense in the book as they did in the film. There were many more of them to start, and the relationships felt at worst immature and unhealthy and at best choppy, disconnected, and disingenuous - it just did not make sense to me why certain characters were together and what they were doing for each other. The conclusion of the story was also lackluster and unfulfilling to me. To be honest, I probably would have dnf’d the book if the film hadn’t been so fresh in my mind giving me hope that things were going to get better.

Overall, I would not recommend this for fans of the film, or for anyone looking for more magic (practical or otherwise) in their magic-realism fiction, but I would recommend it to people who don’t mind a more general, day-in-the-life, generational fiction story.

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👻📚 October Book Haul 📚👻

I only bought one book last month, but it’s one of my most anticipated books of the year - House of Frank by Kay Sinclaire! I first heard about this book through Ezeekat’s YouTube channel (his videos always feel so wholesome, so if you’re looking for another bookish fellow to follow, he’s great!). I loved watching this book’s publishing journey through Bindery, which is a new company that allows content creators like Ezeekat to publish books. Such good news for indie authors and the bookish community! This book is a cozy fantasy set in a mysterious house with a mythical beast caretaker and has themes of loss and found family. Everyone I’ve seen who’s reviewed the book so far says it made them cry in the best way and felt like a warm hug afterward. I’m also a sucker for found family stories. Definitely hoping to read this one before the end of the year!