“Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop” - Roselle Lim

🥐 As with “Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune,” food plays a major, mouth-watering role in this novel. Overall, I didn’t find the narrative in VYMPTS as compelling as the prior novel which I enjoyed.

🥐 Our protagonist, Vanessa Yu, has a huge, joyful, loving, meddlesome family, replete with a cadre of nosy aunties and enough cousins to keep Vanessa’s social calendar full. Her loneliness stems from the absolute absence of romance in her life. She also has the unusual habit of blurting out good/bad/horrifying prophecies to friends, family, and total strangers.

🥐 Vanessa’s eventual romance is cloying, but there’s another one that was far more intriguing. 

🥐 Vanessa has an oddly mild reaction to a dire prophecy she makes for another. Which brings us to the element of magic in this novel: Vanessa and her Aunt Evelyn have the gift of prophecy, only Vanessa (for reasons unexplained) does not view her abilities as a gift and has spent much of her life running away from it even though she is wholly unable to subdue it. It was an interesting premise, but ultimately we aren’t given enough information to understand her resistance and eventual capitulation. Further, Aunt Evelyn’s decades-long obstinacy regarding her own love life, nis explained away vaguely.