The Teahouse Between Tides
Anastasia Jewel's debut sapphic magical realism novel — a Venice teashop, an inherited binding practice, and a slow-burn romance. Book 1 of the Between Tides series.
About The Teahouse Between Tides
Marisol Reyes opens Between Tides Teashop every morning before the marine layer burns off. Three scoops of assam, water just off boil, the chipped brown pot that knows her thumb. She keeps the storeroom latched. She does not, under any circumstances, practice the family’s other work.
The Reyes women are binders. For three generations they have held the Low-Tide Accord — an old agreement between the Venice coast and the people who maintain it, kept alive in rituals so small they look like chores. Marisol walked away after one binding went wrong, and she has spent the years since pretending the work does not need her. Then the storeroom begins to knock. The marine layer holds too long. A certified letter arrives from the county assessor with a photograph nobody took. Someone is doing careful, expert magic on Marisol’s block — and the developer planning to “activate” the neighborhood has just put Between Tides on the agenda of a meeting she wants no part of.
Then Sloane Ashford walks through the door with too much camera equipment, fixer stains on her knuckles, and a question for a woman who has been dead for a year. Sloane is a halidist: a cartographer who uses darkroom chemistry to document places official maps have been told to forget. She has three weeks of work in Venice and trouble at her heels. Esperanza Reyes, it turns out, left more than a teashop.
What follows is forty-three days of early mornings and shared kettles, tea stains and developer stains on the same counter, and a slow-burn partnership between two women who recognize each other’s craft before they recognize anything else. It is also a fight — against a developer, against the paperwork of erasure, and against the grief of a grandmother who planned for every contingency except being alive to explain why.
For readers of Susanna Clarke, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Alix E. Harrow, and Julia Armfield. The Teahouse Between Tides is Book 1 of the Between Tides series — sapphic magical realism about practitioners, vanishing places, and the work of holding them legible.