Review of Tea is Love by Adib Khorram, illustrated by Hanna Cha

*Tea is Love*, written by Adib Khorram and illustrated by Hanna Cha (2025). Published by Dial Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I’ve been writing this for some of my blog posts that are scheduled to come out later, but I’ve been in such a weird head space as of late. For the longest time I was working on my blog without an in-person full-time job, so I was on a remote contract/freelance schedule in addition to being a graduate student.

That meant I had a lot more flexibility in my schedule, so I read and watched a lot more than I do these days. I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump because of the situation I’m in and how tired I am when I get back from work, which has not been good for my reading goals or mental health. I tend to get a little sad when I’m not reading as much, reading goals ignored.

Here and there I keep finding books that interest me, and today’s blog post is one of them. I was emailed by Penguin Random House asking if I wanted to potentially check out a copy of Tea is Love. Now, I don’t typically read and review children’s books, but I am very much known as the tea girl.

Even at work, everyone knows me as the person who has six different teas hidden in her desk drawers. It’s a hobby of mine but also a cultural trait—I grew up in a mixed Iranian American household, so the importance of chai and serving it to guests and family has been embedded in my DNA if you can say.

Anyways, I saw the synopsis of this book and decided I had to read and review it. It looked so much up my alley!

Let’s get into the review.

A children’s book centered around multicultural perspectives and tastes on tea.

This book is only forty page, but each and every page is dotted with the most stunning illustrations. You know it’s good when I’m bringing it up before we even mention anything else about the book! The illustration style is wispy and dreamlike, but it also is hyperrealistic when it comes down to the details.

Anyways, the premise of this book is that tea is more than just something drink. It’s community, history, memories, and friendship.

From East Asian traditions of going to teahouses with the family and gathering to chat to the South Asians who come together with family in their living rooms, sipping chai, there’s a lot packed into the notion of tea.

It reminds me of my studies on how food is a form of lineage. Our recipes are a product of the people who raised us, and by default the people who raised them (and so on). The methods of preparing tea are like recipes we passed down from generation to generation, even if the cultural method of preparing them is different.

One of the best aspects of this book for me though is the fact it is multicultural. From showing a class of all different kinds of students and how they drink and prepare tea, to the unique ceremonies in which special forms of tea are prepared around the world, I found myself in awe at how this was such a good book in that sense.

Once upon a time we didn’t have much representation on the global stage, but now we can see books show an incredible amount of diversity?

Little me couldn’t fathom a world in which this happens. While there are only a handful of cultures represented in this book, it’s another great step forward for representation as a whole.

Overall Thoughts

Because this is a children’s book I don’t have a ton to write about, compared to my usual blog posts. I do think this book has a ton of depth to it despite its simplicity, which defies the stereotype that kid’s books have nothing to learn from them. I find this kind of book to be incredibly impactful.

If I had a kid though I would totally buy this book for them. I’m an adult and I loved this book a lot, and I definitely see myself pulling it off the shelf every so often and thinking about the gorgeous illustrations and the meaning of tea in my own life.

I think if you’re discovering this book and Googling reviews in order to get a feel for it, definitely give it a chance if you’re a tea lover or someone who grew up in a culture that has an immense appreciation for tea. My culture wasn’t depicted in it specifically, nor did I think Middle Eastern culture as a whole, but I could understand the sentiments being expressed here!

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