Book Review: Café Con Lychee by Emery Lee

4 hours ago

6 min read

TL;DR (Too long; Didn't read)

Café Con Lychee is a sweet, easy-to-read YA romance about two rival teens who team up to save their families’ struggling businesses. The language is mostly simple (B1) with a few tricky metaphors, so it’s a good fit for intermediate learners. A few unrealistic plot points and overly “therapist-like” dialogue bothered me, but I still gave it four and a half stars. The audiobook is excellent.

Author

Emery Lee

Genre

Romance, Young Adult, LGBTQ+

Synopsis

Theo Mori dreams of leaving his small town and his parents' Asian American café. Gabi Moreno wants to stay and take over his parents' Puerto Rican bakery. While Theo and Gabi have wildly different goals, they're still rivals. Their parents' businesses keep them at odds with one another. Until the town's new fusion café forces them into a partnership.

The café and bakery have always struggled to make ends meet and this new fusion café is threatening the livelihood of both of their parents. To fix this, these two young archrivals must learn to work together to save the café and bakery.

Recommended English Level

B1 Intermediate

Café Con Lychee features a mix of simple and complex grammar while also including occasional high intermediate level vocabulary and idioms. While some parts may be understandable for the high beginner and other parts may be better suited for the high intermediate, this mix and general vocabulary usage balances it out to a B1 level.

Many books use colorful language in their dialogue tags, but this book keeps it simple. Most dialogue tags are a basic "I say," "he says," and "she says." Here are a few examples:

“It won’t happen again,” Gabriel says.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“I’m so sorry, Theo,” he says, holding out a hand to me.

This is great for high beginners and early intermediates who just want to focus on the words being said and not how they're being said.

Although some of the dialogue can feel easy and approachable, the inner thoughts of the two main characters can sometimes become metaphorical and hard to follow for beginners. Here's an example:

"Anger and disappointment and frustration wage a war inside me until I really wish there was a way to just swing a fist into my problems and force them away."

This isn't a very complex sentence, but it's definitely not written for beginners. And some other examples of metaphor usage can definitely lean more to the high intermediate or even advanced level. They aren't super common, but they do exist. Here's an example:

“But frankly ... I feel like a weed in a flower bed. Like some great, omniscient being is peering down at me, watching as I traverse a space I don’t belong in, eagerly waiting to pluck me out or spray me with some chemical that’ll make me wilt.”

Again, this level of speech isn't extremely common, but it does exist in this book and can leave intermediate learners feeling confused. Although if you're looking to improve your metaphor comprehension skills, Café Con Lychee could help with that.

Overall, Café Con Lychee generally sticks to easy dialogue tags and intermediate level metaphor usage. Occasional advanced metaphor usage, idioms, and B2 level vocabulary might provide a decent challenge, but it doesn't mean you should avoid this book if you're at the B1 level. Café Con Lychee could be a great way to get you out of your comfort zone and push yourself into the B2 level.

Book Review

Café Con Lychee was fun to read and reminded me so much of my own teenage years. Navigating friendships and family dynamics while being in the closet can be a level of stress some people just can't imagine. This book does a great job of showing just how difficult that can be through Gabi's character.

Gabi is a closeted teenager with homophobic, Puerto Rican parents. Let's just say, that feels very familiar. I loved seeing Gabi navigate through his conflicting personal identities. He tries to make everyone happy all the time, only to learn that life just doesn't work that way. Sometimes, the only thing we can do is focus on our own happiness.

Theo was a bit harsh toward Gabi in the beginning. So harsh that I sort of hated Theo during the first third of the story. After a while though, Theo started to warm up to Gabi and thus, I warmed up to Theo. Theo's character was also very self-centered in many ways. It wasn't awful, but he definitely had the tendency to think about himself before others.

This character trait becomes clear when his brother Thomas returns home from college. They have a heart-to-heart and Theo finally realizes just how little he considered the other people in his life. Thankfully, he does learn from this and works toward being more open-minded as the book draws to a close.

Now that we know a little about the main characters, let's talk about the plot point of saving the bakery and café. After the new fusion café opens up in their small town, both the bakery and the café lose their hold on their customer base. This worries Theo because if his family is struggling, he might not get to leave for college like he's been dreaming of doing. And for Gabi, the bakery might be sold, and his dream is to own it one day.

While their desires are wildly different, they both want to save their families' businesses. Because of this, Theo decides to start running deliveries and, once Gabi joins, they start to do deliveries to students during school hours. They set up a mini-café in an empty classroom and, during classes, they leave to make deliveries to other students in other classes. This whole idea felt very far-fetched and convoluted. It was hard for me to fully ignore. Normally, when I read books that have one part of the story that doesn't make a lot of sense, I just ignore it and accept that fiction is sometimes ridiculous, but something about this one annoyed me.

How were the boys running an entire business from inside of the school without getting caught? And how could their teachers let them leave their classes constantly with little to no question simply because they're wearing a homecoming committee badge? Sorry, but I can't imagine that being a reality. As someone who did actually work on his homecoming committee and who was class president of his sophomore class, nothing like that would have worked with any of my teachers. Even as the class president, I'd get maybe one free pass and then the second time I would've tried, they would have shut me down and said I can't miss too much classwork.

Really, it's not a big deal and the book reads just fine despite this. This just took me out of the story a little bit and made everything feel a touch unrealistic. At my school, they would've gotten caught on day one of setting up this in-school café delivery service.

That plot frustration aside, Café Con Lychee was really good. I loved seeing Theo and Gabi work through their differences and learn to be friends. I also loved watching Gabi become more confident in who he is and learning to stand up for himself. His parents were painfully homophobic and his dad angered me a lot, but the story had a good enough finale that I ended up actually kind of liking his parents.

One last complaint... Gabi was way too profound for a teenage boy. There are at least two scenes I can think of where Gabi is psychoanalyzing Theo and it just felt way too unnatural. Teenagers don't talk like this. They definitely try to, and it often feels awkward because their worldviews are too young to truly grasp every detail of the human psyche, but this book made him sound like a therapist and that isn't how teenagers talk. I liked the sentiment and I appreciated what Emery Lee was trying to do here, but it fell flat for me and made those scenes much less meaningful than they should've been.

Writer's tip: your character doesn't see their problems or their friends' problems from the god's-eye view that you do. What you see in their motives isn't what they would see and it most certainly isn't what they would discuss out loud. Maybe they would think it, but they aren't going to psychoanalyze like a therapist.

Despite Café Con Lychee's shortcomings, it definitely gets an easy recommendation from me. I still gave this four and a half stars because not every story in life needs to be taken super seriously. Sometimes you just need to lean back and enjoy the ride. Also, I loved the relationship between Gabi and Theo. I would definitely read another story written by Emery Lee.

Audiobook

As usual, I listened to the audiobook while reading along. The voice actors were fantastic and really differentiated their character voices. The pacing was great and the voices were crisp. I can be pretty picky with my audiobooks, but this one got zero complaints from me.

Final Thoughts

Should you read Café Con Lychee? Yes. It's a fun, easy read for intermediate or advanced English learners. It's cute, it's romantic, and it's easy to recommend. It's not book of the year, but it also isn't trying to be. This is a book that knows what it is and it knows its audience.

I loved reading this book and I will definitely check out more Emery Lee books in the future. If you do pick this up or if you have already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!