60 pages • 2 hours read
Hafsah FaizalA Tempest of Tea
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Act I: Vengeance Never Dies”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Arthie”
Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain descriptions of violence, including colonial and racist violence.
Arthie Casimir walks through the streets of White Roaring at night, unbothered by the vampires that roam the streets. The only two things she cares about are her adopted brother, Jin Casimir, and her teahouse, Spindrift. Spindrift was once a curio of stolen artifacts from other countries until Arthie and Jin raided it, stealing everything and replacing the items with private objects from rich people’s homes. This bankrupted the original owners, and after rumors spread that the location was cursed, Arthie and Jin claimed the building as their own. Spindrift now has a dark secret. By night, Arthie secretly runs it as a bloodhouse for vampires, helping to provide for those vampires who aren’t wealthy enough to obtain blood on their own without endangering others. Despite the tenuous peace between vampires and humans in White Roaring—a peace endangered by the current political climate under the mysterious ruler, the Ram—vampires have started vanishing. This issue also causes concern for the wider populace.
Now, Arthie and Jin are hunting down a patron of theirs, a famous painter named Matteo Andoni, who has not paid his tab in weeks. They go to his large mansion and push past his butler, finding Matteo in the parlor. Matteo, like Jin and Arthie, is also an immigrant, but his European features make him more accepted in White Roaring society.
Matteo quickly blackmails Arthie by revealing his knowledge that her teahouse also serves as a bloodhouse, which she expected. He also reveals that he only wanted to meet her. He pays Jin the money he owes, but they continue to exchange tense, subtle threats. They also discuss Arthie’s pistol, Calibore, which she pulled from a rock. Matteo accuses her of having come to White Roaring in a “boat full of blood” (11), and she, in turn, reveals that Matteo is a vampire, shocking Jin. Matteo mocks her with a Spindrift syringe filled with blood—stolen proof of her illegal exploits—and she tells Jin to shoot him. When the bullet hits, Matteo collapses, hurt but not dead, merely complaining that he liked his shirt. Arthie takes the syringe and leaves but is immediately greeted by a boy who works for her. He warns that the Horned Guard are on their way to raid Spindrift.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Jin”
Now at Spindrift, Jin and Arthie transform the bloodhouse back into a teahouse in a matter of minutes. They usher the vampires out and set to work. The narrative explains that vampires are more in need of a safe place than ever. Twenty years ago, a half-vampire named the Wolf of White Roaring terrorized the streets, murdering and mauling victims without restraint. While normal vampires can control their need for blood, half-vampires are not fully undead; they have too much energy and life and thus less restraint.
While they work, Jin asks Arthie for clarification on what happened with Matteo, noticing that she seems riled up over how much he flirted with her. She offers little to no explanation. Reni, their employed vampire, makes tea to complete the disguise. While everyone in White Roaring knows that Spindrift is a bloodhouse, no proof exists, so they have managed to stay out of legal trouble.
Jin contemplates his history with Arthie, who pulled him out of grief and poverty after the death of his parents years ago. Now, she asks if they’ve gotten any news on their coconut shipments—since they use coconut to help augment the blood—but no news has arrived.
The Horned Guard charge into the room, and the workers immediately offer them tea, confusing them. The guard in charge accuses them of skipping on the rent, which confuses both Jin and Arthie. The guard then sets his men to tearing the house apart in search of evidence. One guard finds a hollow floorboard; Arthie signals to Jin to blow a lightbulb as he pulls up the floorboard. To Jin’s bewilderment, the floor is hollow, although Arthie just put something underneath minutes ago. Disgruntled, the guards depart.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Arthie”
As the crew celebrates, Arthie explains that she used the exploding bulb to disguise the mirrors in the floor and prevent the guards from looking further. She contemplates the current state of politics in the country of Ettenia. The previous monarchs, all masked people who operated under animal-themed titles like Fox or Eagle, ignored vampires, but the Ram has been more aggressive toward vampires. Ettenia has also harmed Arthie personally by colonizing her country of Ceylan for tea, murdering thousands of people in the process. In revenge, Arthie founded Spindrift and took the mystical pistol Calibore from a rock once she determined that it was only held in place by mechanisms, not magic. However the pistol itself is far from ordinary. Calibore was meant to mark the country’s true leader, and many are infuriated that an immigrant girl took it from the rock.
With the teahouse open again, Arthie and Jin set off to question their proprietor on the rumor about their rent. Jin teases her about Matteo but reassures her that their proprietor will protect them. He pickpockets her pocket watch and races her through the streets to the docks.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Jin”
The siblings arrive at Eden Teahouse, a far inferior teahouse that their proprietor enjoys attending. They find him on the porch, drinking bad tea, and he greets them nervously. Arthie and Jin interrogate him about the missed payments. He is reluctant to reveal the truth but does so when Arthie breaks his glasses. He states that the Guard threatened his family until he sold the building to the Ram. The building will be out of their hands in two weeks. Arthie quietly tells him to leave the city and never return, and he flees in terror. The siblings return home, quietly wondering how to save Spindrift.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Arthie”
Exhausted, Arthie goes to her office to work on invoices. She drinks a cup of coconut water from her diminishing resources, then realizes that someone is in the office with her. The person is a young man about her age: a captain of the Horned Guard with a foreign accent and white hair. She throws him against the wall but desists when he asks her if she remembers “what it’s like to live” (43). She draws her gun on him, but he walks closer and proposes an alliance. If they can locate the Ram’s stolen ledger from the vampire Athereum—a dangerous, nearly inaccessible locale—it may give them the leverage they need to save Spindrift and threaten the Ram’s rule, since the ledger deals with illicit trade. She points out that it would be impossible to do both, but he tells her she is smart enough to find a way.
The man tells her that the ledger is in the possession of a vampire named Penn Arundel. This makes her hesitate; unbeknownst to Penn, he is her foster father, whom she abandoned a long time ago. Arthie reluctantly agrees to help but tells him that she needs a crew, including him. (Her real motivation for including the captain on her crew is to prevent him from betraying her.) He agrees and introduces himself as Laith Sayaad of Arawiya, then disappears out her window.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Jin”
Jin broods over recent events and contemplates his childhood, in which his rich parents sent him to a privileged school and pushed him to academic excellence. His parents were researchers who were praised by the previous ruler of Ettenia; they had been researching vampiric nature and exploring the possibility of using coconut water as a supplement to blood. Right before Jin’s 12th birthday, however, he came home to find his family’s mansion burning down. Aware that people might want to harm his family, Jin grabbed a coconut as a weapon and ran through the burning house to attack whoever had harmed his parents, but explosions threw him back before he could confront the shadowy shapes of people on the second floor. Jin’s arm was badly burned as he fled the house, but Arthie soon found him on the streets outside. She convinced him that his parents were already dead and gave him a pastry, urging him to run away with her. Their bond has been inseparable ever since. Now, as Jin contemplates this, Arthie appears and tells him that she has found a way to save Spindrift.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Arthie”
Jin protests against the idea of breaking into the Athereum, citing the danger and impossibility of collaborating with a Horned Guard and criticizing the general scope of the plan, which is far beyond their usual realm of extortion. Arthie points out that they can use the Athereum’s annual auction—the Festival of Night—to break in, despite the complicated rules for entry, but Jin protests that they cannot scrape together what they need in two weeks. Despite his misgivings, Arthie manages to convince him of the plan, and she sets out to recruit her infiltration team.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Flick”
The perspective shifts to Flick, or Felicity, who is Arthie and Jin’s forger. She is the rich adopted daughter of Lady Linden, the owner of the trading company that essentially runs the country. Flick recently committed a significant crime—forging a signet ring for a nobleman who then outed himself and implicated her in the crime, so she has since been confined to her mother’s mansion while Linden ignores her completely. Flick misses her mother, who focuses all of her attention on the company. Flick first started her forging business to help the servants when her mother refused to approve their requests for time away from their work.
As Flick contemplates how to regain her mother’s love, the Horned Guard appear and arrest her publicly, horrifying her and the rest of the household. When she looks at the crowd, she imagines that she sees Jin, whom she has feelings for, but she convinces herself that she is imagining things. As she gets into the carriage with dignity, Jin greets her, and she falls into his lap with shock.
The carriage takes Jin and Flick toward Spindrift, while Jin explains that he has paid off a guard to testify that Flick is in jail. She was to be arrested the following week, but they pulled strings to arrange matters in their favor. Jin pays off the guard to keep their departure a secret, and then they walk toward Spindrift. Felicity stops to give a beggar child a coin, but Jin stops her and sends the boy away. He explains that the boy was a member of a gang. Flick insists that she no longer engages in forgery because it is wrong, but Jin promises to make it worth her while.
They arrive in Spindrift, which is bustling with activity, and Flick realizes that she can use Arthie’s secrets to earn her mother’s forgiveness. One of the servers brings her a cup of tea with an address written on a note at the bottom. She decides to cooperate with Arthie and Jin for her own gain.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Arthie”
Arthie broods on her mother’s brutal death and the colonization of her homeland, reliving the bullets that killed her parents and the blood that haunts her nightmares. She watches from a balcony in Spindrift as Flick enjoys the atmosphere. Jin joins her, and they discuss closing Spindrift in order to focus on the heist. The Horned Guard, Laith, lounges nearby, and when Arthie approaches him, he gives her a bouquet of flowers, to her disgust. Laith reluctantly reveals that he lost someone important to him in his own past. Arthie, Jin, Flick, and Laith all depart to recruit the fifth and final member of the team.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “Flick”
Flick wonders exactly how Matteo Andoni will fit into the plan but is more concerned with what her mother would think of her if she saw her at this moment. She worries about Arthie discovering her plans to betray them to her mother but silences herself. As they wait to be let into the Andoni mansion, Laith greets his companion—a tiny gray and white kitten—which the others mock as a sign of his saintliness, although Flick is delighted to pet the tiny creature.
Feeling on edge, Flick follows the others through the mansion. The butler gives them an extensive tour through the house and leads them to the parlor, where Matteo, talking to a flushed girl, greets them. He quickly turns the girl down; Flick is amused to recognize the girl as someone who was cruel to her last season. Matteo greets Arthie flirtatiously. Arthie quickly exposes him to the others as a vampire, which shocks Flick, although she quickly realizes that Matteo is likely just lonely. She wonders if she can gain her mother’s approval by turning him in. Arthie unfurls a map on the table and announces their plan out loud—and Flick realizes that she has exactly the information she needs just from the plan alone.
Part 1, Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Ettenia and White Roaring are both heavily based on Victorian England, but several key differences add to the intrigue of the plot, such as the unnamed, masked ruler who is chosen by council. An important piece of symbolism in the story occurs with the animal-themed names for these rulers, whose royal guards are also named to represent the reflect the version of “power” that each animal has. For example, the current ruler, the Ram, is backed by the Horned Guard, which is symbolic of a ram’s primary defense. However, the primary use of this official mask is to hide the ruler’s true identity. Historically, rams are symbols of virility and masculinity, and this connotation perpetuates the idea that Ettenia’s ruler is a man—not Lady Linden, as the book reveals in the final chapters. Additionally, by emphasizing the hidden nature of Ettenia’s ruler, the novel suggests that those in power will always find ways to commit abuses anonymously and with impunity. For much of the narrative, the Ram remains a faceless enemy, and only when she is identified as a very real, very present threat can the characters finally begin to constructively oppose the hegemony of the Ettenian throne.
This hegemony primarily takes the form of aggressive colonialism designed to increase profits for Ettenia and the EJC, although the discovery of the Ram’s identity reveals that these two entities are one and the same. Colonialism, however, permeates Ettenian culture and daily life, and its effects are impossible for the populace to avoid; even the victims of the Ettenian regime have no choice but to participate in its colonial practices. A prime example of this dynamic can be found in the coconuts that Arthie imports from Ceylan, her homeland, in order to provide her vampire clients with something “new.” (This practice is based on the common belief that coconut water can be used for blood transfusions, which, according to medical professionals, is only loosely accurate.) Although Arthie never acknowledges the implications outright, her use of imported Ceylan coconuts in Ettenia indicates that she is contributing to the colonial regime. This issue demonstrates the complex nature of colonial power. Arthie needs the coconuts to survive, and as a result, she must draw from her suffering homeland, just as a vampire needs blood. Because there is no ethical way for Arthie to avoid this transaction, it is clear that living amidst a colonial dynamic always requires individuals, no matter how marginalized they may be, to accept some level of responsibility in their effect upon the colonized countries whose products benefit their colonizers. Arthie is not a colonizer herself, but she does benefit from the imbalanced power dynamic between the two countries, even if she has also been severely hurt by this same issue. In this way, Hafsah Faizal explores unique nuances of The Impact of Colonialism on Personal Development.
This political complexity contributes to the complicated game of pretend that Arthie plays with herself in the first part of the book. The author provides a wealth of oblique clues hinting at Arthie’s secret status as a half-vampire, such as her need for the coconut water to clear her head. The issue is also indicated in Laith’s subtle implication that she is no longer alive, as well as her tension with Matteo, who knows her secret from the beginning. However, because Arthie never openly acknowledges her own identity in the narrative, her reticence on this point reveals her self-loathing for her half-vampiric nature, and it is clear that her only form of coping with this unwelcome truth is to pretend that she is something she is not. For example, Arthie’s desperation to feel alive drives her to convince even herself that she is more than a half-vampire. Arthie therefore lives the protective lies that she tells other people, embodying them so completely that the truth almost loses its meaning. She is fundamentally closeted and denies her own identity. Combined with the legends of the Wolf of White Roaring, her iron-clad denial prevents her from dealing with the realities of her nature and foreshadows a future incident in which she will lose control of herself and her own carefully constructed narrative.
However, despite Arthie’s hesitance to reveal her true nature, the novel does not present vampires as being any more predatory than ordinary people; they have a unique capacity for violence, but it is no more dangerous than anyone else’s. Flick’s perspective sheds new light upon this theme, as her kindness and gentleness lend themselves easily to a sympathetic perspective toward vampires, even though she must struggle against her mother’s carefully taught prejudice to view them in a negative light. When Flick realizes that vampires’ immortality renders them “lonely,” this moment encapsulates the novel’s compassionate perspective on vampirism. Arthie’s determination to keep her vampirism a secret is therefore a form of protection against the unwelcome knowledge that eventually, everyone she loves will die, while she will live on. Additionally, Flick’s quick rejection of her mother’s prejudices against vampires also foreshadows the conclusion of her own romance with Jin. She loves Jin as a human, but after he is transformed at the novel’s conclusion, she will have to learn to love him as a vampire, or else relinquish her love entirely.
