Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim, audiobook, 9h 13m
From GoodReads: Ever since she can remember, Vanessa has been able to see people's fortunes at the bottom of their teacups. To avoid blurting out their fortunes, she converts to coffee, but somehow fortunes escape and find a way to complicate her life and the ones of those around her. To add to this plight, her romance life is so nonexistent that her parents enlist the services of a matchmaking expert from Shanghai.
After her matchmaking appointment, Vanessa sees death for the first time. She decides that she can't truly live until she can find a way to get rid of her uncanny abilities. When her eccentric Aunt Evelyn shows up with a tempting offer to whisk her away, Vanessa says au revoir to California and bonjour to Paris. There, Vanessa learns more about herself and the root of her gifts and realizes one thing to be true: knowing one's destiny isn't a curse, but being unable to change it is.
My review is for the audio version of this book. First I want to point out that I listened to this on Spotify. I was excited to see that this book was available to listen to for free with my account. I had a few issues where Spotify would just stop playing or would jump around to other chapters (like being in chapter 15 and then it skipped to chapter 51) and didn't give the chapter number so it was a full 1 minute into the chapter before I realized that I just spoiled something for myself. I have also since learned about Spotify's terms for narrators and authors who put their work on Spotify (Google it if you're interested but short version is it's not good) so I will not be listening to audiobooks on Spotify moving forward.
Now onto the book! I loved this narrator. I think she did a great job giving all the aunties, I mean characters, life! Asian aunties remind me of Southern aunties. Always in everyone's business and always looking for a beau for the single nieces. It took a 4 or 5 mile run for me to really start this book and get into it but I found that I truly enjoyed the story. The slight twist in Vanessa's journey took me by surprise but in a good way. It made sense for the story to go in that direction. Overall this story left me feeling really good. I gave it 4.75 stars only for the issues that I had with the audiobook, which I am totally going to chalk up to using Spotify instead of Audible.
4.75/5 Stars
2024 Reading Challenge: 6/50 complete
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