Episode 26: This Is How You Lose Her

Hello listeners! We are back after a little summer hiatus. Over the last few months we've all been caught up in work, travel and other life happenings but we are BACK!

This time around, we decided to read another book by Junot Diaz because we all enjoyed reading his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His most recent collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her, proved to be another page-turner for us, as we so enjoy Diaz's writing style, but had some controversial themes that we touch more on in the podcast.

On our next episode, we will be discussing the coveted Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the newest installment of the (hopefully never-ending) world of Harry Potter. It's going to be a goooood episode, people. Tune in!

Tea of the Day:

Cookies & Cream by Special Tea Box (use code "THREEFORTEA" at checkout for 20% off!)

Currently Obsessed:

Ashley - Pokemon Go, Stranger Things

Alyssa - All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, DoorDash, and her brand new neice Cecilia!

Julienne - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Stranger Things

Currently Reading:

Alyssa - All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Ashley - nadaaaa

Julienne - Into the Wild by Jack Krakauer

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Episode 25: Dear Fang, With Love

Hey listeners!

We are pleased to announce that we just hit 25 episodes, we're officially a quarter of a century old! (that's how it works, right?). In our milestone episode, we discuss a book that just hit the shelves in May: Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe. If the pretty cover wasn't enough to get us to buy the book, we were sold once we read the synopsis:

"A bold, spellbinding novel featuring one of the most fascinating protagonists in recent memory, Dear Fang, With Love tells the story of seventeen-year-old Vera—ravishing, troubled, wildly intelligent—who travels to Europe with her estranged father, hoping that an immersion in history might help them forget his past mistakes and her uncertain future.

Lucas and Katya were boarding school seniors when, blindingly in love, they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, after a decade of absence, Lucas is a weekend dad, newly involved in his daughter Vera's life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a high school party, Lucas takes her to Lithuania, his grandmother's homeland, for the summer. Here, in the city of Vilnius, Lucas hopes to save Vera from the sorrow of her diagnosis. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers of her own. Why did Lucas abandon her as a baby? What really happened the night of her breakdown? And who can she trust with the truth? Skillfully weaving family mythology and Lithuanian history with a story of mental illness, inheritance, young love, and adventure, Rufi Thorpe has written a breathtakingly intelligent, emotionally enthralling book."

Listen to the episode to see how we liked it! And if you haven't read it yet, beware of SPOILERS!

Teas of the Day:

We had so many teas to try, mainly from our Plum Deluxe tea of the month club shipment, that we decided to have a tea tasting and try them all!

• Zesty Lemon Sunshine Chai - Plum Deluxe (not available online yet - hopefully soon!)
• Vista Blend Herbal Tea - Plum Deluxe
• Royale Honeybush Herbal Blend - Plum Deluxe
• ...and last but not least, The Julienne Blend! Find out why this tea was named after one of our very own podcasters and what the other girls thought about it! If you'd like some of this tea, please email us at threeforteapodcast@gmail.com and we can make some for you!!

Currently Reading:

Ashley: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling, Percy Jackson: The Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan
Alyssa: Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Julienne: Into the Wild - Jack Krakauer
Kristal: Dear Fang, With Love - Rufi Thorpe, The Birth of Venus - Sarah Dunant, The Silver Star - Jeannette Walls, Reform Your Inner Mean Girl - Amy Ahlers and Christine Arylo

Currently Obsessed:

Ashley: Herbivore Blue Clay cleansing bar soap
Alyssa: Good Eggs grocery deliver service in the SF Bay Area
Julienne: Shimmering Skin Perfector highlighter in the color "Champagne Pop", part of the Becca x Jaclyn Hill Champagne Collection
Kristal: RuPaul's Drag Race (available on Hulu!)


We received a very generous offer from an online tea shop called Special Tea Box, they gave us our own discount code! If you want 20% off your order, use the code "THREEFORTEA"

https://www.specialteabox.com/


Thank you everyone for reading and listening. We wouldn't be where we are today without your support! Don't forget to check us out on Instagram (@threeforteapodcast), Twitter (@three4tea) and Facebook!

And remember, pinkies out!


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Episode 24: The Girl on the Train

Hello, all! In this episode, we open our monthly subscription package from Plum Deluxe and fawn over the delightful blends they sent us: Zesty Lemon Sunshine Chai (YUM!) and Vista Blend Herbal tea. (Spoilers: Julienne tried the Zesty Lemon Sunshine Chai, died, came back to life, and told us all that's the tea they serve in heaven.) We then talk about the books we're currently reading, what things we're currently Obsessed with (with a capital O for emphasis), and get to have a great discussion of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN! Who saw the twist coming?! Which character was the most annoying?! Who is excited for the movie to come out in October?!
Also, important announcement: we're on Stitcher!


Tea of the day:
Raspberry Earl Grey from Plum Deluxe


Currently reading:
Alyssa: Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
Ashley: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling <3
Kristal: Silver Star, by Jeannette Walls


Currently obsessing over:
Alyssa: Wearing her boyfriend's aftershave as makeup primer
Julienne: Too Faced Stardust palette, and GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE!
Ashley: Early 90s-2000s shows--including Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Power Rangers, Charmed, and...
Kristal: FIREFLY! In particular, obsessed with the strong female characters and their general badassery

Episode 23: Room.

Episode 23: Room

It's Ashley's birthday episode! In this long but content heavy podcast we discuss Room, the novel and Oscar nominated movie adaptation. We open our tea of the month club package from Plum Deluxe, sip on some iced David's Tea and invite friend and previous guest, Ashley to call-in for our Feminist discussion that ties into the book. it's a passionate episode that is sure to leave you thinking. Enjoy!

Tea of the Day:

(iced) Raspberry Cream Pie by David's Tea

Plum Deluxe package: Raspberry Earl Grey

Currently reading:

Kristal: Room by Emma Donoghue

Ashley: Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan

Alyssa: Into the Wild by John Krakauer

Julienne: Room by Emma Donoghue

Books mentioned:

For more information visit http://itsonus.org/

Why I Didn't Like All the Birds in the Sky

Hi everyone, it's Alyssa! 

If you listened to our latest podcast, you may have heard me briefly voicing that I wasn't the biggest fan of our latest book club read, All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. 

I was a bit of a weenie and didn't feel comfortable sharing my opinion of the book during our podcast. I'm afflicted by this fear of offending people; I have been groomed by society as such. But mainly, I wanted a bit more time to gather my thoughts so I could try to articulate exactly why I wasn't impressed with this book. I've thought about this for a good while now, so here are the main reasons why I didn't like this book. Please keep in mind that my assessment of the book is purely my opinion, and you are of course entitled to your own. 

NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD

In my opinion, there are a few key elements that make up a good story: plot, setting, character development, themes, etc. Each of these things plays an important part in a story I would want to recommend.

This book, I felt, was lacking in many of these departments. 

Let me start with my main gripe: the characters in this book are underdeveloped. We have Patricia and Laurence, two best friends who I could tell were gonna end up together pretty much from the beginning of the story. 

• Patricia = witch, symbolizes nature, magic, and the supernatural.
• Laurence = ultra nerd, symbolizes science and technology.

They're both ~outsiders~ who form an ~unlikely friendship~ but for some unclear reason, get really irritated with each other a lot throughout the book and then lose contact for a brief period of time before running into each other again and after a few more brief (and by all accounts, unpleasant) run-ins, wind up saving the world from total annihilation together. None of it is very convincing. Actually, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to relate to these characters, but I couldn't even like them. They both came off as whiny, and I felt like we as the readers were supposed to empathize with them because their lives both sucked for different reasons (read: bad childhoods). 

Really, I couldn't help but wonder why their parents were such (apparently motiveless) assholes. How am I supposed to buy that without knowing anything about their parents? What happened to them to make them such awful people? I feel like if you're going to start a book with an omniscient perspective from childhood, it doesn't hurt to include a little backstory about their families. But we barely get that at all--in fact, the only inkling we get that these characters maybe are more than one-dimensional is from Laurence's tirade about his parents being complacent about their lives. 
I get that that wasn't the focus of the story, but how can I buy that the two main character's parents just plain suck without any explanation? I, as a conscious human being, want a little bit more of a reason before I just declare hatred for a set of characters I know little to nothing about. Call me high maintenance.

On the sex-having: 
Although it was pretty obvious they were gonna end up together, this happened pretty out of the blue. How did they go from best friends to having a tumultuous relationship, losing contact, reconnecting, recognizing their feelings, that whole journey...? The reader should not have to imagine that entire inner dialogue--it's not the reader's job to work that hard. The Laurence and Patricia thing, that's the most important relationship that the writer needs to forge in the story. There could've been more time dedicated to that that I could've lived with. It didn't need to be a bodice-ripping lusty love epic, but a little more effort to move the reader along that path could have only made the story better. It's not too much to ask to help us wrap our minds around these seemingly sudden feelings of affection. Since we didn't get that, it seemed like lazy writing to me.

And can I say how annoyed I was every time there was a description of what Patricia was wearing? Do we ever get that same kind of attention about Laurence? Like, I know that Patricia wore these mini dresses and over-the-knee boots--and I know that after she had sex with Laurence, she threw on her clothes but didn't bother to put a bra or panties back on--but why do I know that? What is that adding to the story??? That's now how you build character development, any college-level creative writing course will teach you that. If it doesn't further the story, why do I need to know so much about what Patricia looks like but it's okay for me not to know as much about Laurence?

Now, in that same vein, there are all these other characters who do absolutely nothing to move the story forward at all. It seems like we are supposed to believe that these other characters who are named a couple times in the book lend some sort of believability to Laurence and Patricia. But they don't. We readers don't care about the roommates, we don't care about the students they went to school with, we don't care about the girlfriend Laurence pines for unless they all do something to move the story forward. Otherwise, it's just more characters to try to keep track of while we try to figure out who is important and who isn't. 
Writers sometimes do this thing where they like a name and include that name as a character in the story--but that doesn't work for character development. Personally, I don't care about someone unless they're important to the story. I recognized all the barely-there characters in the book as a lot of filler, and I don't want to read filler. Who wants to read filler?I think a lot of these characters and scenes were actually pointless and one-dimensional and could've been cut out to make for a more focused story. The plot wouldn't have been affected whatsoever by this, but the reader would've graciously gotten some brain power back by not expending so much energy cramping up trying to figure out who the important people are.

A good thing to focus on in any book is the plot, but I honestly couldn't tell what the hell the plot was for the longest time while reading this book. And at one point, I thought, why am I still trying so hard to figure out what's happening--and I was more than halfway through the book. Switching back and forth between narrators is sometimes effective, but unless done carefully, it just makes the writing seem choppy and all over the place. Things kept happening out of the blue (like when Laurence and Patricia suddenly fall into bed together and we get a spontaneous sex scene).

My other main issue with this book was the setting. Anyone who reads YA would probably agree with me that world building is a really crucial element to the story--it's the first part of suspension of disbelief. It needs to be done well, and it's not something I'm willing to be okay with being half-baked if I'm going to like the story. 

Point blank: this book does a bad job of it.

Example: Eltisley School. What, in the end, do readers know about it? Can anyone describe it well? Can we picture what it was like there? For me, the answer is a really unfortunate "no."
I mean, when writers write YA books, they should know the audience a little. Wouldn't it have been nice to have a clear description of this school where Patricia learns witchcraft? Instead, we readers only know about it through lukewarm, half-baked flashbacks through a really moody character's memories of how much she hates her life. Can we just have a couple pages about it?? You know why everyone is batshit crazy over Harry Potter? Because J.K. Rowling spent sufficient time and energy on world building. I mean, if the book is a dystopian/paranormal/sci-fi/fantasy YA mash-up, then the world in which everything happens is really important. But in this story, there are more gaps than anything else, which was really distracting me from caring about how the story was going to unfold. 

And a word on the birds. The birds seemed really trite a thing to name a story like this after. We have a story about two best friends who get torn apart, the story is infused with witchcraft, saving the world from total destruction, super advanced futuristic technology, other dimensions, a prophecy, a borderline apocalypse, even a self-aware AI (which, by the way, I knew caddies = Peregrine as soon as "caddies" happened, which was another letdown--this big reveal was too easy to figure out). But I fail to see why the association of caddies = Peregrines = all the birds in the sky was supposed to be the big thing that was supposed to tie everything together. Who saved the world, then? Patricia? Laurence? Caddies? Artificial Intelligence? Witchcraft? What???

Overall, the book was a big disappointment for me. There were so many promising things at first, but all in all, the delivery was flat. The book could've used a lot more workshopping to trim the fat, iron out the plot, decide who was important to the story, and spend more effort on the characters. I really did want to like the book, but in the end, I felt like I should've used the time to read something else.

So there you have it (if you read it). These were my most prominent thoughts while reading, and I didn't want to force any listeners to hear me give a negative review on the book--I, for one, don't like to listen to people bitch about something. But let me know if you want me to be more open about what I think in the future! I'm trying to be more cognizant of social conditioning like people-pleasing behaviors (like clamming up when I don't like something) and would welcome the chance for personal growth. 

Pinkies out!

--Alyssa

Episode 22: Plum Deluxe and Book Recomendations

Happy Daylight Savings, tea lovers!

This episode is jam packed with lots of recommendations, so if you're in the mood for a new book or want to try a new tea, stick around because we're about to blow your minds!

We were lucky enough to have Andy, Founder and Creator from Plum Deluxe, send us a few free samples of his hand-crafted teas. Based in Portland, this organic tea is made in Oregon and uses primarily local sources for all their ingredients. With special ingredients love and gratitude (shhh, don't tell), these teas spoke to the cozy book-lover in us all.

We also decided to be a *banana* (read in a British accent, please) and have this episode feature many different books with our reviews and recommendations. We hope you enjoy this fully caffeinated, ultra recommendy episode. 

P.S. Email us your address if you would like a newly redesigned Three for Tea sticker!

Teas of the day: Featuring Plum Deluxe tea

Reading Nook Blend Black Tea 

Portland Rose City Chai

Chocolate Mint Dessert Tea

Spring Hickory Oolong Tea

Currently Recommending:

Alyssa:

10% Happier by Dan Harris

The Room by Emma Donoghue

The Sell Out by Paul Beatty

Kristal:

Birth of Venus by Sara Dunant

Ashley:

The Infernal Devices: City of Angels by Cassandra Clare

Julienne:

Emma by Jane Austen

Movies/Shows Mentioned:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies adapted from the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith

A Knight's Tale (best movie ever)

Broad City

Shadowhunters

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boom.

Episode 21: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Podcast

 

Hello listeners!

On our Valentine's Day (Galentine's Day, more like it) episode, we discussed our most recent read, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, and talked about our favorite on-screen and literary couples (and our not-so-favorites).

We really enjoyed reading a book set in San Francisco, with many references to the Bay Area, which is where Three For Tea is based out of! It made reading the book all the more enjoyable.

Happy listening, and may the chins be ever in your favor!

Listen on iTunes! 

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Currently Reading:

Julienne: Emma by Jane Austen
Ashley: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan
Alyssa: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Kristal: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte, Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale

Tea of the Day:
The Earl's Valentine - David's Tea
Sleigh (SLAY) Ride - David's Tea

Episode 20: The Brief Wondrous Life of Three For Tea.

EPISODE 20

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Happy New Year Listeners! In our first podcast of 2016, we dive into the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, while also having a make up party. We discuss what our 2016 reading goals are, if we achieved our 2015 goals and also try a new tea! Enjoy!

2015 Reading Goals:
Kristal: 13/25
Julienne: 14/18
Ashley: 11/12
Alyssa: 29/52; so far and still going! (April 2015-April 2016)

2016 Reading Goals:
Kristal: 2/20
Julienne: 0/20
Ashley: 0/15
Alyssa: 29/52

Currently Reading:
Kristal: Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

Julienne: Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

Ashley: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? By Mindy Kaling,
             and The Infernal Devices: The Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Alyssa: Miss Peregrine's home for Peculiar Children: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
             Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Tea of the Day:

Zhena's Gypsy Tea

Vanilla Chai

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