Tea With the Black Dragon. Add a Splash of Gin to Mine. Resurrected Post.
Yesterday I finished R.A. MacAvoy���s Tea With the Black Dragon. Serendipitous timing I think considering today is Mother���s Day. If you haven���t read the book, I suppose that comment requires some explanation.
Tea With the Black Dragon is a short novel, of a brevity we sadly don���t see much any longer. It features only a few characters, among whom Margaret Macnamara features prominently. She is a mother, searching for her adult daughter. She is of an age that in most novels would see her as a secondary character, relegated to caretaker or giver of sage advice. Instead here she is the prime mover and a fully realized and interesting character. And a mother. So, happy Mother���s Day Margaret Macnamara wherever you are.
I found the novel very refreshing. Some might consider it odd that I consider a book from the early 1980s to be refreshing instead of something contemporary and novel. Truth is that current books make up only a minuscule portion of my reading diet. Most of what I read is older stuff. Tea With the Black Dragon is far from epic door stopper fantasy. It isn���t vampire chicks on bikes urban fantasy. It isn���t even twee, cozy fantasy. Instead it is sui generis. It doesn���t deal in any tropes. If you rounded up the usual suspects and put them in a lineup, you���d come away disappointed ��� none of them feature in Tea. Yet the narrative (brief as it is) is entirely satisfying, meditative, funny, and ��� surprisingly to me ��� replete with action. Fight scenes? Check. Speeding cars? Check. Gunfire. Check and double check.
Tea will stand as a reminder to me of the absolute freedom fantasy allows a writer. And I am thankful for that.
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Published on May 14, 2017 14:22
