Customer Reviews

High Tea

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was excited to read the book because I frequent tea rooms and have had many wonderful experiences there. Living in Los Angeles myself, I was curious about the mixture of English and Angelinos in the book. All of the characters were extremely disappointing, except for the daughter Kate. I felt that these were archetypal characters that were drawn more as stereotypes and that the author didn't like anything about LA. Between the actresses, the gay and lesbian friends, the hookups, socialite vegan rude customers, and the disaffected English mother, I thought that the author was reaching for realism in a glass jar of pre-prepared character types.

Truly, the world she created for the plastic people was toxic and oppressive. Everyone nattered on about nonsense, and even the characters one would think should have depth, were circling the drains of their own lives. The end of the story showed promise, but it was difficult to slog through the book to get to the end.

After discovering that the author wrote this as a stage play, it made sense why the text was more dialogue driven and had stilted, annoying interruptions of the characters' thoughts. It is one thing to give actors stage directions to explain why they would look or act a certain way, but writing a text is not the same thing. I felt as if the book needed significantly more editing and reworking. It read as a senior creative writing project for college. Does the author understand what it means to write an omniscient text? Everyone's thoughts were pasted onto the page haphazardly, and it was highly annoying.

As far as the recipes, really? Most of the tea books that are available have much more extensive recipes. The assortment of foods and teas available in the tea room packaged as High Tea were ludicrous, and the host of recipes at the back of the text was laughable.

There are better books available, and if you are looking for an exceptional tea experience in Los Angeles area, go to The Scarlet Tea room in Pasadena, where they do an excellent service.

This is a very charming read about three women who all find their way in life. I really thought it was cute and quick.

Really loved this book. Four women, working together in an English tea shop in Los Angeles, support each other, even though they sometimes disagree. The women are of various ages so you can find a character or an issue with whom to truly identify. It really is like cozying up with a bunch of best friends for good laughs and great company.

I was so excited to find and read this book. It sounds like the perfect light escapism. However, it is so poorly written that finishing it was a chore, something to be done simply so I could move on.

It made sense when I read the author's bio on the back cover and learned this story started as a stage play. It is written as subtexted dialogue with the speaker's thoughts interspersed. There is no clear point of view character, the reader is in everyone's head and there's not a real person among them.

Margaret owns a British tea room in LA. She manages the stereotypical staff of aspiring actresses and a lesbian chef. The characters go through just what you'd expect in a sit-com. Hookups, breakups, casting couches, scones.

There was a lot of potential here for a charming story but it was squandered.

Sandra Harper's HIGH TEA looked to be a light, savory little chick lit novel -- and I guess, if I had mentally checked out for the day, I might have enjoyed it more. I read Harper's OVER THE HOLIDAYS last December and thought it was fun, though it was badly stricken with Too Many Characters-itis. This one suffered the same illness: too many characters and far too many storylines resulted in my total ambivalence about everyone in this quick read.

Margaret is our main character and, as such, we get the most of her back story -- which would have been fairly interesting if I had a clue what any of it meant to her. Her ex-husband, Tony, was a starry-eyed actor who brought his young family to Los Angeles as he pursued a stage career. Now older, wiser and gay, Tony and Margaret have divorced but continue to raise their daughter, Kate, together. All very interesting, but how was Margaret feeling? She's a 60-year-old divorcee whose husband -- a man with whom she was once madly in love -- has left her and come out of the closet. That's enough to send anyone into a psychotic break, but we never get an inkling of emotion from our heroine. This isn't a fresh wound in the story, of course; all of this went down years before HIGH TEA opens. But still: nothing.

Lilly's plotline felt completely ridiculous to me, too. Here we have a woman with dreams, ambitions, goals -- and the inability to stop being a doormat to her young girlfriend, a high-powered Hollywood producer who treats Lilly more like a mother than a significant other. And Clarissa and Lauren passed in and out of the story so infrequently, I found myself skimming any mention of them toward the end of the book.

I'm a huge fan of chick lit and love tea -- hence why I picked this one up, coupled with the pink cover -- but I sped through it in no time because I was bored. Margaret's sojourn to England provided a brief and promising change of scenery, but it never amounted to much. Lackluster.

I really loved the cover of this book. The story not so much. I did manage to finish it, but it was certainly not what I expected it to be.

I loved this book. It was delightfully funny and entertaining. A nice escape from the everyday dulldrums. The characters kept this book interesting.

I found myself lost in in the happenings of the shop keepers as well as pondering what would happen next.