A review by storytimed
The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

2.5

I really, really wanted to like this

It's a riff on Holmes and Watson where Holmes is a disgraced tutor and Watson is an injured spaceship and they're both living in space Vietnam!

Unfortunately, despite the nice ideas, this never transcended its influences. The Tea Master and the Detective ended up reading like Holmes and Watson, but worse. Ancillary Justice, but not as good.
So many of the character traits feel like they're stretching to reference the source material. Why is a spaceship AI brewing tea that she can't drink? Because she needs some connection to the Holmes, who is an addict because Holmes is an addict, and de Bodard thought that psychoactive sci-fi teas are cool and she needed to shoehorn that in somewhere

I never really got an impression of the characters as people, or the plot as a mystery, or the setting as a lived-in place. Some of this is the limitations of the novella, which means de Bodard has to skip past character beats in order to get everything in under page count, but I also sort of got the sense that de Bodard was so enamored with ideas that she forgot to write a story.