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A review by mimipancakes
Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
1.0
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an audio version of this book!
Yeah, so I did not like this book. As far as I know, this is the first cozy fantasy book I have read. I have read a couple other reviews and they said there was too much action and too high of stakes to count this book as "cozy." That said though, as I have no experience with what makes a cozy fantasy "cozy," I'm just going to focus on this book in general.
To start, I could not tell the two main characters apart. Even though I was listening to this as an audiobook and the two characters had distinctly different voices, I still couldn't tell the two apart. It was a third-person narrative, but would still go back and forth between the perspectives of the two leads. And every time a new chapter would start I would sit there and ask myself "okay, is this the mage or the guard?" and I would never figure it out.
As for the plot... everything was just resolved so quickly. Any time a problem came about, regardless of size, it was resolved within the same chapter it was introduced (sometimes even the same paragraph).
Lastly, the dialogue. Not good. It was either super cringey (for example, referring to the griffin as a "good boy") or just very exposition-y. The dialogue just kind of felt like a means to an end. The characters never felt like real people, they were just there to regurgitate information to the reader.
I just found this book so boring. The only reason I finished listening to it was because I was provided the audiobook through Netgalley.
Yeah, so I did not like this book. As far as I know, this is the first cozy fantasy book I have read. I have read a couple other reviews and they said there was too much action and too high of stakes to count this book as "cozy." That said though, as I have no experience with what makes a cozy fantasy "cozy," I'm just going to focus on this book in general.
To start, I could not tell the two main characters apart. Even though I was listening to this as an audiobook and the two characters had distinctly different voices, I still couldn't tell the two apart. It was a third-person narrative, but would still go back and forth between the perspectives of the two leads. And every time a new chapter would start I would sit there and ask myself "okay, is this the mage or the guard?" and I would never figure it out.
As for the plot... everything was just resolved so quickly. Any time a problem came about, regardless of size, it was resolved within the same chapter it was introduced (sometimes even the same paragraph).
Lastly, the dialogue. Not good. It was either super cringey (for example, referring to the griffin as a "good boy") or just very exposition-y. The dialogue just kind of felt like a means to an end. The characters never felt like real people, they were just there to regurgitate information to the reader.
I just found this book so boring. The only reason I finished listening to it was because I was provided the audiobook through Netgalley.