The Tea Dragon Society – Quick Review

Imagine being able to have tiny dragons with leaves and flowers spouting of their heads/horns as pets. That’s precisely what ‘The Tea Dragon Society’ by Kay O’Neill is about.

The book starts off with the protagonist Greta working with her mother, who tells her about how blacksmiths used to be as important as magicians ‘once upon a time’. That very day, Greta rescues a lost little dragon, that’s supposedly a ‘tea dragon’, whose leaves can be used in making a great brew. She soon finds and befriends the dragon’s owner and learns about their ways.

Kay O’Neill keeps everything very gender-fluid in the book, you have women blacksmiths, men with long braided hair who love making tea, basically characters that you cannot immediately put under a ‘he’/’she’ bracket immediately. Everything is colorful, cute and dreamy. But the plot is not all that coherent – it’s just a bunch of people having tea, swapping stories and chilling with cute little dragons, some of who reminded me of Pokemon characters. The author doesn’t take a lot of effort with names and simply labels the dragons after types of tea – like ‘Jasmine’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Peppermint’, ‘Earl Grey’…. you get the gist. But well, they are tea dragons after all, so guess it’s not that bad to have such obvious names.

The artwork is bright and super adorable, although I feel like some of the dragons could’ve used more detailed features. Overall, ‘The Tea Dragon Society’ is a cute, adorable book, but not something that will stay in one’s memory for long. It’s a 3/5 from me.