Tea with the Black Dragon eBook R A MacAvoy
Download As PDF : Tea with the Black Dragon eBook R A MacAvoy 
In 1980s San Francisco, a mother searches for her missing daughter in this Nebula Award–nominated tale that is part fantasy, part mystery, and part love story.
Offering “a deft blend of the oldest of magicks in a dragon, and the newest of sorceries in computers” (Anne McCaffrey), this is the incomparable novel that garnered Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick Award nominations, and earned its author the John W. Campbell Best New Writer award—the “astonishing fantasy debut” of R. A. MacAvoy (Locus).
Martha Macnamara knows that her daughter, Elizabeth, is in trouble—she just doesn’t know what kind. Mysterious phone calls from San Francisco at odd hours of the night are the only contact they've had for years. Now, Elizabeth has sent her mother a plane ticket and reserved a room for her at the city’s most luxurious hotel. Yet, since Martha checked in, she still hasn’t been contacted by her daughter, and is feeling lonely, confused, and a little bit worried.
But Martha meets someone else at the hotel Mayland Long, a distinguished-looking and wealthy Chinese man who is drawn to Martha’s good character and ability to pinpoint the truth of a matter. They become close quickly, and he promises to help her find Elizabeth. Before he can solve the mystery, though, Martha herself disappears—and Mayland realizes that he’s in love with her.
Now, a man whose true nature and identity is unknown to those around him will embark on a potentially dangerous adventure in a city on the verge of exploding with its own sort of magic as technology spreads through the region that will become known as Silicon Valley. An elegant, delightful, and unusual novel that blends ancient myth with modern wizardry, Tea with the Black Dragon is “a small masterpiece, setting a fantasy story against a contemporary background” (Booklist).
Offering “a deft blend of the oldest of magicks in a dragon, and the newest of sorceries in computers” (Anne McCaffrey), this is the incomparable novel that garnered Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick Award nominations, and earned its author the John W. Campbell Best New Writer award—the “astonishing fantasy debut” of R. A. MacAvoy (Locus).
Martha Macnamara knows that her daughter, Elizabeth, is in trouble—she just doesn’t know what kind. Mysterious phone calls from San Francisco at odd hours of the night are the only contact they've had for years. Now, Elizabeth has sent her mother a plane ticket and reserved a room for her at the city’s most luxurious hotel. Yet, since Martha checked in, she still hasn’t been contacted by her daughter, and is feeling lonely, confused, and a little bit worried.
But Martha meets someone else at the hotel Mayland Long, a distinguished-looking and wealthy Chinese man who is drawn to Martha’s good character and ability to pinpoint the truth of a matter. They become close quickly, and he promises to help her find Elizabeth. Before he can solve the mystery, though, Martha herself disappears—and Mayland realizes that he’s in love with her.
Now, a man whose true nature and identity is unknown to those around him will embark on a potentially dangerous adventure in a city on the verge of exploding with its own sort of magic as technology spreads through the region that will become known as Silicon Valley. An elegant, delightful, and unusual novel that blends ancient myth with modern wizardry, Tea with the Black Dragon is “a small masterpiece, setting a fantasy story against a contemporary background” (Booklist).
Tea with the Black Dragon eBook R A MacAvoy
I love this book and for that I give it all five stars. I just re-read it over 30 years since its first reading and found it held up remarkably well. Even the obsolete computer references were merely quaint instead of painful. In a way, they anchor it to its time while allowing the very sweet love story to become timeless. The mystery and villains are just as relevant today as then. There is a big caveat to the 5 stars though. The Kindle edition's formatting is very bad. There are places where text is lost and many places where there is a break in time/location/PoV where there would have been originally a space to mark it and it just runs on which causes a serious disconnect in the reading. It is possible that the reviewer who found it unintelligible was partly fuddled by this problem though the character of Oolong/Mayland Long is only slowly revealed.Product details
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Tea with the Black Dragon eBook R A MacAvoy Reviews
Martha Macnamara flies out to San Francisco to meet her estranged daughter, Liz, who is in some kind of trouble. When Liz doesn’t show up for their meeting, Martha is left not knowing where to turn. Then the bartender in the luxurious hotel where she is staying introduces her to the mysterious Mayland Long, a wealthy Chinese man who lives in the hotel. He tells Martha that she and Long have a lot in common they both have unique ways of looking at life, and they both love to read. He laughs when he whispers that Mr. Long once told him that he used to be a Chinese black dragon who loved to read. Martha and Mr. Long become friends, and she asks him to help her find her daughter. Then Martha disappears, and Mayland Long must rely on his intelligence, enormous strength, and his ability to understand people to sort through the clues and find both women before it’s too late.
I really enjoyed this mystery. The magic of the dragon is there, but it’s subtle. Mayland Long, or Oolong, is stuck in human form. He deals with fatigue, gunshot wounds, and hunger just like any other human, yet he has the determination to keep going. Plus, he has some special skills that help him just when he needs them. Mostly, he is a curious, gentle soul who has searched for centuries for truth, and when he finds Martha, he knows he has found his truth.
Martha is delightful, a talented violinist who sacrificed her career to raise her daughter (which Liz resents), and now she tours with a Celtic band, earning just enough to get by. She has the ability to see the real person beneath the surface, and she is not afraid to say what she thinks.
The story takes place when computer technology was in its infancy and cassette tapes were used instead of CDs, but this only makes the book more interesting and does not distract from the charm of the two main characters.
Oolong—black China tea—gets its name by combining the characters that mean "black" and "dragon." So when Martha Macnamara, Gaelic fiddler, joins Mayland Long, an intriguing dark-skinned oriental gentleman with curiously long fingers, for tea in his elegant, book-stuffed hotel room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she is startled by an outstanding sculpture of a black dragon. Long tells her, "It's Oolong."
Yes, the tea is black China, and the sculture is a black dragon named Oolong. So, it rapidly becomes apparant, is Mayland Long. When he sets aside his scholarly search for the truth and his master, which he had been prophecied to find in San Francisco, to help Martha track down her daughter, he will put his own long life in jeopardy.
I first read this book in the mid-80s, when I was just getting into computer programming. MacAvoy expertly wove a a tapestry of fine design by combining computer technology with the poetry of Zen philosophy and mythical Chinese dragons. I was rapt in the romance of a dragon's study of humankind, and taken with Long's life among books. Who would not want to be the dapper, wealthy, studied, elegant dragon in his hotel-room tower?
Reading it again in the edition for the first time in a decade, I now see more of the appeal of Martha Macnamara, and the romance between these two older people, both slightly alienated from the push and thrust of modern life and modern technology—especially now that my own years are advanced! It helped to be familiar with San Franciso, although MacAvoy's descriptions of the city are so evocative that this knowledge adds only a minor gloss to the tale.
Either way, the book has not lost any of its original charm due to the slight dating of computer tech in the modern half of the story, but has only acquired more polish. Make an appointment to enjoy this high tea, whether it is your first sip, or a familiar refreshment. Oolong does not disappoint, and neither does MacAvoy.
4 stars for the story, 1 star for the formatting. I'm only rounding up to 3 stars out of fairness to the author.
The formatting made it EXTREMELY difficult to read. No indents or spaces between paragraph and, no scene breaks made dialog hard to follow and the story confusing. One character would be speaking, then in the next paragraph it was the same character speaking again. Did I miss something? Was that a paragraph break? WTH? I'd be reading about one character doing one thing, then all of a sudden it was a different character doing something else.The first scene break that appears in the "Look Inside" sample looks like a chunk of the book got cut out. Martha's walking down the street, then suddenly she's talking to Mayland in the hotel bar. Did something get cut out? Or was that just a bad a scene break? I can't tell.
I've never seen an e-book more poorly formatted. Every indie book I've ever read is far, far better formatted than this one was. If I'd bought it for 99 cents, it wouldn't be so bad. But I paid over $5 for the book and expect to at least be able to read it without having to struggle. No more Open Road Media books for me!
I love this book and for that I give it all five stars. I just re-read it over 30 years since its first reading and found it held up remarkably well. Even the obsolete computer references were merely quaint instead of painful. In a way, they anchor it to its time while allowing the very sweet love story to become timeless. The mystery and villains are just as relevant today as then. There is a big caveat to the 5 stars though. The edition's formatting is very bad. There are places where text is lost and many places where there is a break in time/location/PoV where there would have been originally a space to mark it and it just runs on which causes a serious disconnect in the reading. It is possible that the reviewer who found it unintelligible was partly fuddled by this problem though the character of Oolong/Mayland Long is only slowly revealed.
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