From my Amazon BNA pitch:
The Tea Master is full of thrilling adventures, capital-R Romance, modern intrigues and personal tragedies that would be at home in any Three Musketeers novel. Warren is born in tragedy and becomes a genius of tea. His nemesis is Victor Fishfire, whose film was so great, it killed Warren's mother. Their lives are complicated by billionaire Andrei Grattecon-Swyve, a tattooed tribesman who intends to live forever.
As Warren's wife Mira Manchu grapples with sexist Hollywood and more-sexist tea growers, Hamadryad Botticelli makes us wonder how much we can do for smart pop stars who do drugs anyhow. Rounding out the cast is Stella Grattecon-Swyve, mother of Andrei and creator of the world-famous 'Guillermo Heterodyne' stories. She is the mysterious woman behind the Swyveland amusement parks loaded with everyone's favorite cartoon bear, Aloha Panda.
The Tea Master moves from the difficulty of exterminating unicorns, to the trouble in taking a real baseball bat to diet-pill-based hallucinatory flying reptiles, to the life lesson that it's never as easy to decapitate someone as you hope it will be. The moral? Teabags are bad. Read it as a popcorn adventure piece with explosions, pirates, and the occasional big dance number, or as the touching story of a man who was born so wrong he doesn't know how to get it right.
Juicy, sprawling and smart, The Tea Master will please fans of Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke or Neil Gaiman, as well as admirers of Joseph Heller, Michael Chabon, Mark Helprin, Douglas Coupland... and probably Tolstoy and Cervantes. These days the author mostly reads the better serial writers of material like Girl Genius, Sluggy Freelance, Accursed Dragon, Skin Horse, Dr. McNinja and Penny Arcade - and with friends like that you know you won't find The Tea Master boring.
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