Tea & Tomes

2/5 Stars. This poetry collection was just okay.

1) Aesthetically, this is book beautiful. The cover is soft to the touch, and the artwork on the front (by the author herself) is calm and serene. The red is so lovely, and heartwarming. Its a gorgeous book, but....

2) The poetry is very, very simplistic. The simplicity is not always bad, but at times it reminds me remarkably of poems I scribbled in my journal when I was in the 6th-8th grade. The rhyming can be silly. I didn't find much of profundity, nothing that took my breath away.

3) A small portion of the poems were lovely, and summed up the complicated vastness of love in a few words. Occasionally a poem would be extremely relatable to my current or past relationships, but there was not enough of this for me to give a higher rating.

I understand that sometimes poetry is confusing, but there is a difference between 12-year-old girl-writing-about-a-crush straightforward, and understandable but beautiful and well, poetic!  

4) Maybe I gave this a low rating because I was so excited about it. It has a very high rating on goodreads, the title is excellent, and it is described as "expressing the intricacies of love and loss (....) Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers" This led me to expect to find the beating, pulsing heart of emotion laid bare in beautiful metaphors and imagery, not this.

If you're keen to revisit the times of your young crushes, give this a go! There are absolutely some worthwhile poems in here too, if you get past the silly ones, and it does appeal to a small part of me that loves cuteness and idealistic views on romance.