USA Today, Sunday Times, and Indie bestselling author Rebecca Thorne brings the Tomes & Tea series to a delightful, cozy close for our beloved lesbian book- and tea- sellers.
This trade paperback release features vivid sprayed edges, a beautiful color illustration, and a never-before-seen bonus short story!
Reyna and Kianthe have no trouble ruling the Queendom, battling evil alchemists, and rescuing adorable baby dragons, but can they save their town from the ravening influx of.... tourists?!?
On the night of her kidnapping, all Reyna wanted was a relaxing cup of tea. She didn’t expect to be dropped in a hidden cell, but what the hells. She’s flexible.
When Kianthe “rescues” her wife, she expects they’ll be back at New Leaf having tea by noon. But there’s a problem: an alchemy circle marred Reyna’s cell. What does a radical group of alchemists want with the Queendom’s newest sovereign… and why did they think they could get away with this?
To make matters worse, Kianthe and Reyna’s hometown is having its own problems. Word of New Leaf Tomes and Tea―and its celebrity owners―has finally spread, and tourists are flooding into Tawney. As their friends struggle with the sudden influx, Kianthe and Reyna have to face a bigger conundrum than rogue alchemists: the fact that closing their bookshop might be the only way to save their town.
Things can’t just be simple, can they?

My Review:

The story of Tomes and Tea could have been wrapped up at the end of the previous book, Tea You at the Altar. After all, the traditional ending of romances has always been the wedding – and the bedding that follows. But Reyna and Kianthe anticipated that long ago, because their world is not ours and in any case, our world has changed.

But the ending of Tea You at the Altar, traditional as it might have been, left a literal ton of unanswered questions. Not about Reyna and Kianthe’s relationship but about all of the duties and responsibilities they have taken on, together AND separately.

Kianthe is the Arcandor, the Mage of Ages, the most powerful mage in all the realms and the true leader of the Magicary – even though she delegates the administrative work of her job to the High Mage who oversees the magical academy located there. In spite of the fact that the Arcandor and the current High Mage pretty much hate each other for living.

Reyna is the newly crowned Queen of the Queendom – even though she’s not remotely a member of the ruling family. But she’s willing to do the work – and there’s a metric buttload of THAT after years under the rule of the tyrannical – and most likely sociopathic AND bat-shit crazy – Queen Tilaine.

But the Magicary and the Queendom’s Capital are not remotely near each other – not even as their griffins fly. And neither seat of power is close to the place that Reyna and Kianthe call home, their combination book and tea shop, New Leaf, in quaint, remote Tawney.

A setup which brought to mind a conversation from The Fellowship of the Ring that takes place between Frodo and Sam while they are in Rivendell for the Council of Elrond about the possible ending of Frodo’s not yet written book about the quest they haven’t really started yet. [Frodo opined] “And they all settled down and lived together happily ever after? [To which Sam’s unspoken response was] ‘And where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.”

And that’s exactly what Reyna and Kianthe are wondering when this final entry in the series opens. The home of their hearts is in Tawney, but Reyna has just been kidnapped from the Queen’s Palace and Kianthe rides to the rescue along with a company of the Queensguard. They’re caught between being together and performing their respective duties, and something is always falling into the crack between.

What they eventually discover has fallen into that chasm is a villain who has been playing an extremely long game, spending decades gaining power and trust at the Magicary while secretly inventing an entirely new branch of magic, stolen from someone else, as villains do. All it will take to wrest control from both the Queendom’s and the Magicary’s hands is to make a really big sacrifice – which no villain ever plans to do all by themselves – or, if at all possible, by themselves at all.

It’s up to Kianthe and Reyna to stop the WORST from happening – even if they have to make a big sacrifice of their own. Because that’s what THEY do, save the day and the world in spite of the odds and without counting the cost to themselves. It’s the job they both signed up for, separately and together, and they’ll fix this mess or die trying. Or both.

Escape Rating A: I had pretty much the same reaction to this book as I did the previous, Tea You at the Altar. I started out listening, both because I was enjoying the narrator, Jessica Threet and because I wasn’t quite ready for the series to end. Then I got caught up in the rising tension of the plot against the Magicary, the increasing threat of the rogue alchemists making all the trouble, along the forces that were making life in Tawney unliveable for EVERYONE and decided to switch out of my leisurely stroll through this final book in favor of learning if any of my guesses about the sources of any of the threats were correct.

I had to know. And now I do and the ending – and this time it’s a real ending – wraps up all the loose ends from the entire series and ties the story up in a lovely bow with happy endings all around.

Except the villain, of course.

It was terrific the way that the rather different tensions ratcheted up on all sides in this final book. Reyna’s mostly fine in the Queendom, but it’s not where she wants to be and she’s not doing what she wants to do, but she’s doing it well.

Her kidnapping opens the story up to its final arc of big problems and the painstaking solving thereof, when she discovers an alchemical symbol hiding underneath the floor of her cell. Alchemy is the bastard child of Kianthe’s elemental magic, and it’s powered by sacrifice. Finding that symbol under the floor raises questions about who wants whom to sacrifice exactly what – and why.

Finding the same symbol hidden in the Magicary draining the source of all elemental magic, the Stone of Seeing, tells Kianthe and Reyna that whatever this plot is, it’s big. Really, really big. Change the balance of the whole entire world big.

From that point the story is off and running at the speed of dragon wings. Literally. And the tension doesn’t let up until the very desperate, but ultimately satisfying, end. Along the way there are plenty of the cozy fantasy touches that make this series so much fun, particularly the mess back home in Tawney where the tourists are overrunning the place in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the Queen and the Alcandor in their natural habitat.

But what powers the grand finale of this series has to be grand enough to power that happy ever after ending – and it definitely does. When this series first started, back in Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, I thought it had promise but wasn’t sure whether or not it could get out of the long shadow cast by Legends & Lattes. Now at the ending I’m happy to say that it delightfully did, and that Tawney stands proudly beside Thune as a cozy fantasy destination that it has been a joy to visit every step of the way.

I’ll miss Kianthe and Reyna and their sweet romance and terrible puns, but I’m glad they got the happy ever after they worked so very hard for. And I’m looking forward to see what comes next from the mind of their creator.

The Princess Bride meets Travis Baldree in Tea You at the Altar, the third cosy fantasy in Rebecca Thorne's bestselling Tomes & Tea series. Our sapphic adventurers must navigate the ultimate maelstrom – their own wedding!
Kianthe and Reyna are ready to finally walk down the aisle, and in just seven days their wedding of a wifetime will become a reality. There's still so much to do but, like all best-laid plans, everything seems to be going awry.
Their baby dragons are causing mayhem in the town of Tawney, and Kianthe’s uptight parents have invited themselves to the wedding. Yet, worst of all, Reyna has become embroiled in a secret plot to overthrow Queen Tilaine. The world seems against them – and how are they going to live long enough to say ‘I do’?

My Review:

The Tomes & Tea Quartet has turned out to be an epitome of cozy fantasy romance – something I don’t think anyone expected when Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea came out pretty much directly in the wake of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes and we were all very much there for it because there wasn’t anything else like either of them at the time.

Of course, there is now because they’re both oh-so-good and they have very much of the same feels and yet they’re not nearly as much like each other as appeared at first blush. And all the blushes thereafter.

The thing about cozy fantasy is that, while bad things do happen to good people, the bad things aren’t necessarily all that bad – and they tend to get resolved in peaceful – or at least bloodless – ways.

But Tomes & Tea has hewed a bit closer to its fantasy roots in that there really is true evil afoot in the person of capricious, rapacious Queen Tilaine, and the solution to the Queendom’s – and the whole world’s tyrant queen problem is going to involve some political shenanigans, some dangerous skullduggery, and a certain amount of outright treason.

In other words, this is the story where Kianthe and Reyna stage a coup against the very queen that Reyna once swore fealty to as a Queensguard. The thing about staging a coup is that both successful and failed versions of that act generally end up bloody. The only question is which side the blood belongs to, with the answer generally being both – and LOTS of it.

But this coup is all wrapped up in lace and chiffon, as the overthrow is intended to occur in the literal middle of Reyna and Kianthe’s wedding. But that’s only if they manage to get all their ducks and pirates in a row, wrangle the townspeople of Tawney AND Kianthe’s estranged parents, keep last-minute suitors for both brides at bay and, last but absolutely not least, find a second-choice candidate for Queen to stand against Tilaine – because their first and otherwise only contender just said “not just no but hells no” and has managed to make it stick in spite of all the pressure to change her mind.

Escape Rating A: I was intending to savor this a bit. After all, it’s the next-to-the-last entry in the Tomes & Tea series, and I’m not going to be ready for it to end, even at the end of the next book. Probably no one else will be, either.

But I was listening to this in audio, the narrator Jessica Threet was doing a lovely job, the story was proceeding at a lively but not breakneck pace – it’s not that kind of story – and I realized that the cozy pace was beautifully concealing an ever ratcheting amount of underlying tension and I just couldn’t wait any longer and read the last third in a rush because it was just time for the other boot to fall, for Queen Tilaine to crash the party, and for someone’s world AND worldview to come crashing down.

Hopefully Tilaine’s, but I’d reached the point where I HAD to know, my patience was out, and another hour was going to see me through to the end if I was willing to stay up for it.

Which, of course, I was. And I did. And OMG the damn thing ends on a huge and downright shocking and even painful cliffhanger and the final book in the quartet, Alchemy and a Cup of Tea, won’t be published until August 12 but I already have an eARC and I doubt I’ll be able to wait that long to find out what happens next. And finally.

Kianthe and Reyna have earned their happy ever after, they deserve it, they’re entitled to it, and I can’t wait to see it happen. And I probably won’t. Wait that is. (Wherever the line was when they were passing out patience, I didn’t start out with nearly enough to stand in it and wait to get more.)

If you LOVE cozy fantasy, you’re going to leave Tea You at the Altar already itching for the finale and looking for something to tide you over in the meantime. Alchemy and a Cup of Tea isn’t coming until August. The next Legends & Lattes book, Brigands & Breadknives, isn’t coming  until NOVEMBER, so that won’t help with the tiding over unless you need to get caught up and/or want to indulge in a reread while you wait.

If you haven’t had a chance to blush over Kimberly Lemming’s Mead Mishaps series, (That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon, That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf, and That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human (yes, there’s a theme here!)), that series has a very similar vibe to both Legends & Lattes AND Tomes & Tea, (including the pirates!) and is just plain cozy – and even sexier – fantasy romance fun and should keep the vibe going long enough to get to Alchemy and a Cup of Tea – along with plenty of cups of tea, of course!