11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Tea and Spices": Jewel in the Corona, April 16, 2000
This review is from: Tea and Spices (Paperback)
This is Nina Roy's third novel. Earlier she's published two with Black Lace. She is a brilliant writer. Witness her story in "Desires," the anthology I edited with Adrienne Benedicks. Nina Roy is sintellectual (ie., intellectual with a laconic sense of sin), who defies norms with passion, blows rings around hollow hypocrisy.
She is also multicultural - in the best sense of the word, because she brings people together from far corners of the world, joins them, and entwines them breathlessly. And in its midst, we forget the colors of our skin, our class distinctions, we forget ruler and the ruled.
Her first novel was about a sensual, intelligent beauty, member of the Tzarist royal family, maneuvering her way through the Bolshevik revolution. "Tea and Spices," is about Devora Hawthorne, an English wife in India during the British Raj, who, bored with her bureaucratic husband, desires her servant, the dusky and handsome Rohan, as her lover. Nina Roy gives us India with its heat and dust, its cities of bitter joy, mosques and temples, corpulent maharajas - and through all of these, sensual spine tingling, toe-curling sex.
In a strange way, "Tea and Spices," invites dangerous comparisons with that famous novel by E. M. Foster, "A Passage to India," and actually manages to get away without injury. Those of us who live in the west, harbor a secret yearning for the mystiques of India. Reading Foster, we were enchanted with the personality of Dr. Aziz. Reading Nina Roy's "Tea and Spices," we are reminded of our anticipations in that novel: would - could-anything happen between Aziz and Adela Quested? It doesn't happen there, but here? On a dark, silent night, when Devora cannot sleep, and Rohan lies awake in the verandah. She comes out to get a breath of air and sees him one with the dark. He is quiet, vibrating; she, trembling with an unknown awakening.
Is "Tea and Spices" Nina Roy's answer to "A Passage to India?" There we remember that Dr. Aziz and Fielding want to be friends but India's colonized and inferior position comes in the way. Here...? Will Devora and Rohan conquer what their more famous antecedents couldn't? How poignant was that scene between them, that brilliant conclusion of the novel! Their horses almost kissing but retrained by the riders, violently drawn back? How will "Tea and Spices" end?
Read it!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No choice at the beginning...., May 28, 2002
This review is from: Tea and Spices (Paperback)
Since I have been waiting and waiting for the next Natasha Rostova Black Lace book (I hate it when authors don't produce as quickly as I would like them to), I decided to read this book to tide me over. I wasn't sure what to expect since I am such an avid fan of Rostova's Black Lace series, but this book delivered as fantastically as her others. It is a historical novel of the British in India, telling the story of a British woman who experiences a number of....well, experiences!
One of the main reasons i like Rostova's novels is that she creates fully 3-dimensional characters, both male and female. The men are not reduced to dogs, the women not to vapid airheads. Admittedly, I didn't find the male character Gerald (Devora's husband) as interesting as the male characters in the Black Lace books, but he holds his own. The excellent writing and the story are vintage Rostova. Now if she would only hurry up and write another.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great erotica, February 12, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Tea and Spices (Paperback)
I guess I need to reconsider my view of erotica, which I thought was always just a fancy name for porn -- and it is, in some cases, but this book isn't one of them. Make no mistake, the book Tea and Spices is definitely explicit, but it's not like the stuff you'd read in most porn publications. It's hot and raw, but with actual characters and emotions -- not barbie doll replicas or men with only gargantuan schlongs.
I've read some of the Black Lace books and have not been very impressed -- although after reading this book I am going to read some of Natasha Rostova's other books and see if she carries the same mix of sexuality and a great story through in her other novels. The publishing world could use more of this EROTICA and less porn. Good job to the authors!
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