Thank you to Netgalley and Oni Press for letting me read an advanced copy of this book! My friend has a saying that goes like “dessert isn’t for your stomach; it’s for your heart” and I feel like, if you were to replace “dessert” with this book, and “stomach” with head, this would 100% apply for The Tea Dragon Festival. The main thing with this book is that it’s soothing. It’s not complex, and it won’t make your brain work at a hundred miles an hour to figure out what’s going on. This is meant to be beautiful and soothing and nice, and it shows in the most wonderful of ways. The colours in this graphic novel are, to put it simply, to die for. They’re soft yet vibrant, and you want nothing more than to just lose yourself in them. And that’s without saying just how gorgeous the illustrations are, in and of themselves. Truly, I doubt I’ll ever find a book or series cuter than the Tea Dragon series. It’s so… Wonderful. I feel like I’m floating when I’m reading it, and find myself smiling without even realizing it. This book in particular made me really emotional because the main character is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. As a non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns in English, that made my heart swell to at least three times its normal size. I felt like crying when I first realized it, but those tears would have been happy and far from sad. And the use of they/them pronouns is just one small bit of the diversity in this novel. Just in this book, there’s what appears to be a male/male (I think, though I don’t think their genders were ever specified) couple, people of colour, sign language use, and probably a ton of other things I didn’t even notice due to how natural they felt in the story. I know this book is for all ages, but reading it has made me want to have a kid really, really bad so that I can get them to read this series too. It’s so beautiful, soft, soothing, diverse and entertaining, that I don’t see how this could be a less than the absolute perfect gift for a child. It’s already a great gift for an adult, but children deserve to have the chance to read this wonderful series too, and so I know for a fact that I’ll be giving these books to my cousin’s children for Christmas. They’re unfortunately the only children I know, but I do think they’ll love it. Or at the very least, their parents will love reading it to them. All in all, this book made so so so so soft. It’s the most soothing thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, and I simply cannot recommend it enough.
