Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne

An underappreciated bodyguard casts her current career aside in favour
of romance and small-town entrepreneurship, thus earning the
incandescent fury of her absolute monarch ex-boss.

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/tea-for-two
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On 16 Apr 2024 13:06:56 -0000, jdnicoll@panix.com (James Nicoll)
wrote:

>Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, volume 1) by Rebecca Thorne
>
>An underappreciated bodyguard casts her current career aside in favour
>of romance and small-town entrepreneurship, thus earning the
>incandescent fury of her absolute monarch ex-boss.
>
>https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/tea-for-two

Sounds like a wonderful read, but I would have preferred it if the
author had plugged a few obvious plot holes.

You are absolutely correct th at a bookstore that also serves tea is
not a viable business model in a world in which the printing press
hadn't been invented yet. So, if, instead, the printing press had been
invented, but the absolute monarch decreed that possession of a book
printed on one was a capital crime - which didn't worry the
protagonists who mistakenly thought they had run far enough away -
then the book would have made sense.

As being imitative of another recently successful book - well, if
people could get knock-offs of Star Wars or Star Trek right, readers
or viewers wouldn't complain. Similarly with Tarzan of the Apes or
Lord of the Rings.

John Savard

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:54:19 -0600, John Savard
<quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:

>As being imitative of another recently successful book - well, if
>people could get knock-offs of Star Wars or Star Trek right, readers
>or viewers wouldn't complain. Similarly with Tarzan of the Apes or
>Lord of the Rings.

I was going to try a humorous follow-up to this post as well, but the
best I could come up with was "Star of the Unborn" by Franz Werfel,
which is an obscure, rather than wildly popular, work, so the fact
that its title seems to combine two categories of titles of successful
franchises doesn't really help...

However, among my search results was "Star of the Sea", which turns
out to be an epithet for an individual well-loved by Roman Catholics.

So in a world where "Star of the Galaxy" is a novel about an
adventurous female space pilot... who suddenly finds herself pregnant
without having done anything to deserve it... and then the novel
becomes a Dune knock-off after the child grows up...

assuming the book was successful instead of being thrown on the
rubbish heap and generally regarded as highly offensive to boot in
addition to being badly written...

John Savard

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:10:30 -0600, John Savard
<quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:

>and then the novel
>becomes a Dune knock-off after the child grows up...

But since the novel's title means that she, and not her son, is the
primary protagonist... presumably, it will need to be structured like
this:

Act I: Her character, as a female Han Solo, is established;
Act II: Her son, of mysterious origin, becomes a messianic figure on a
troubled planet;
Act III: Mommy steps in and puts a stop to this nonsens, finding a way
for the oppressed people of said planet to gain their freedom without
plunging the galaxy into war.

That would even make it less of a Dune knock-off.

John Savard