Reviews with content warning for Child death - The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

I love books where I feel like I am able to learn something new about a culture I knew nothing about. It was a harrowing tale of love, loss, family, and adoption. My heart soars for the main character in this book and her journey wrestling with wanting to leave the culture and traditions she grew up with but also longing for home. I love that the book shows Haley processing her interracial adoption and what that means about how she identifies and who her true family is. A powerful and compelling story. Thankful for my time with the Akha people and I would be lying if I wasn’t considering being a tea person now.

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sskinner155's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

I struggle through the first few chapters of the store because there are some brutal scenes. I also struggle with narratives that have an emphasis on spiritual but I stuck through and got a complying story. Two girls connected to tea and a rich history of tea as well as a culture I’m not familiar with, love to unlike able characters and a multi generational story.

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clemrain's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a strong story of motherhood, love, culture, and other tribulations of life.

I want to write a review for this novel, but an analytical essay is coming to me much stronger than my thoughts on what I liked and disliked. It’s a rich read.

The characters in this novel are strong. All fully complicated, dimensional, and show growth in some form. Which is a great achievement for a novel full of this many characters.

The novel mainly follow’s Li-yan. Some of the story also gives us tidbits of Yan-Yeh all of which I thought were clever and proved the need for them effectively.

Li-yan is a beautiful character. Her entire life flowed so effortlessly from the pages to me. I felt as if I were with her every step of her life in this book.

Motherhood as a concept was sincere and flowed from So-sa, to Li-yan to Yan-yeh. I like that Akha men recited thier lineage, and this novel captured the linage of the Akha women. The men have the names of their father, and the women had their story.

Lisa See had a whole website dedicated to the research she’s done for this book. It’s mainly pictures and videos. I’m not sure about the depth of the research but See has spent time on it. This isn’t a textbook, but I think it’s a beautiful introduction to the history of tea and Akha people. I thought See was respectful in presenting the ideas of something that isn’t western. Nothing stood out to me as the author looking down on the Akha traditions.

The resolve of Li-yan wasn’t to push away what she grew up in, but rather embrace is deeper as she grew older even when she left her village and entered a wealthier life. The history of tea sometimes read like a textbook and sometimes we got to experience is through dialogue and plot.

San-pa was cursed with a horrible death and got one. San-pa and Li-yan were born in days that made their marriage difficult, and even changing the days of thier birth they still had a difficult marriage. These little things could’ve gone any other way, to say “look, see how stupid their beliefs are?” But none of that happened. I was scared of the author contributing to the colonization of the Akha people. But that never happened. Which is amazing.

Ont thing that always took me out of the story was Li-yan’s vocabulary. Sometimes, it felt too modern and didn’t fit in with the rest of her sentence structures. I remember Li-yan mentioning superstition to refer to some of her cultural ideas and I was confused. We hadn’t been introduced to her going to school at the point. And Li-yan was critical of the colonist teaching in her school so I wasn’t sure why she would use the word superstition. This is just one example that comes to mind. Maybe I read too much into it, but I was taken out of the experience.

The story inched slowly and it took me a while to be invested in it. But by part two I can say it was very difficult for me to put down this book. I do think some parts really dragged on and could’ve been condensed but because so much of it is Li-yan’s thoughts, I was fine with some of the on going paragraphs. Li-yan is constantly fighting with herself, with her culture, with her education and with her happiness. I liked reading these thoughts, it just made Li-yan a good main character.

Good ending. I shed a tear. It was so impactful and abrupt. Well executed.

I have a lot more to say but they’re full of spoilers and my thoughts are very muddled. But all that is to say I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

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invisibleninjacat's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I really liked this! I liked all the characters, and was really invested in the turns of their lives. We only see glimpses of Haley, even, and I still really connected with her as a character. I also really loved the details of the tea growing process and how intimately Li-yan's personal story interacted with the history of pu'er.

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