Tea Dragon Society was my favorite book of the year when it first came out and I knew that I had to get my hands on Tea Dragon Festival. This book is just as charming as the first. The artwork is captivating and gorgeous. While I usually fly through graphic novels, I had to savor this one over two days. The best description I can give is that this book, and the one before it, are nurturing to the soul. I always feel better after reading it because of the gentle language used and the representation that is true to life. This is a must read for all humans and tea dragon alike!

ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review!
Thanks for the opportunity to review this book!

5/5
I will never be disappointed by anything by Katie O'Neill.

This is yet another beautifully illustrated, incredibly wholesome story.
It has deaf representation, and a community that uses ASL to communicate!
It's awesome and I absolutely love the diversity Katie interweaves into her books. Her illustrations are as gorgeous as ever! Can't wait to pick up a finished copy in September!

Katie O'Neill can do no wrong! Her books are always so beautiful and touching without being over the top. I especially loved the message in this one about how just because something comes easily for you, it doesn't mean it has no value. Effortlessly inclusive by showing people of all colors and normalizing queerness and sign language usage - this book rocks! I'm gonna need like a gazillion more just like this, please! :)

As usual, Katie O'Neill delivers a heartwarming story wrapped in layers of beautiful color. The art is incredibly adorable and makes you wish for plush figures of everyone, especially the tea dragons. Diversity is a natural part of the story, with dark-skinned, queer, and disabled characters filling the foreground and background. I hope this series will continue with even more installments to bring joy to readers like me.

The Tea Dragon Festival is a companion prequel to the graphic novel The Tea Dragon Society, featuring both old and new characters and just as many adorable dragons. The art is gorgeous (and there were fungi and beautiful woods! I loved that a lot.)

This time, the story follows a genderfluid main character who loves gathering food from the forest, and a confused dragon who woke up after eighty years of sleep. The story was cute, but what made it truly stand out was how it normalized queerness and sign language. Also, it's so refreshing to read about a world in which people of many different ethnicities coexist and the world doesn't always default to western customs - see which kinds of food was drawn and sometimes the eating utensils, for example.

Another thing I really appreciated was that this graphic novel said that just because something is easy for you, it doesn't mean it has no value. More than anything, this is a story about community, and finding your own place in it, and I thought it was wonderful.

The only thing I didn't love was the part at the end that attempted to explain dragon taxonomy, made a mess in which it mixed up species and subspecies, and capitalized specific epithets. I kind of wish it hadn't been there at all, because I care about that sort of thing.

OMG! This was so adorable! It is a prequel to The Tea Dragon Society and it made me feel so happy. It was a delight to read, I really enjoyed this graphic novel. The artwork is gorgeous and it is as stunning as the first one. The whole lot made my heart melt, I felt so much love and joy while reading it and I will definetely read it again. It also has a lot of representation such as LGBTQ+ , non-binary main characters, deaf rep and more. Plus, dragons! It's a magical book and for sure it's made for everyone to read.

After reading The Tea Dragon Society a few months ago, I was so happy to learn that Katie O’Neill wrote a second book in the Tea Dragon series. The Tea Dragon Festival was equally as beautiful and powerful as its predecessor. The lessons it teaches are somewhat more nuanced, which I loved. The characters are all so adorable, and O’Neill includes elements in this book I have never seen in a graphic novel before, like sign language.

As you can tell from the cover art, a new type of dragon is introduced in The Tea Dragon Society. While all of the dragons in the first book were quite lil, the follow-up features a full-size dragon who can change forms. He has a very interesting history, and it’s fascinating to watch him learn more about the human world throughout the story.

The main character, Rinn (they/them), also learns a lot about themself throughout the book. They feel trapped in the everyday minutia of daily life, and struggle to find purpose and meaning in their work. This is a struggle most readers will relate to on some level, and I found it really beautiful to see how Rinn dealt with their feelings.

There isn’t much more I can say about O’Neill’s artistry that I haven’t already said in my Aquicorn Cove review. Each character is rendered with so much heart and life. I would love to step into one of her books and find a new home among the tea dragons.

There are a lot of other deep ideas that shine through Tea Dragon Festival; self-acceptance is a big one. Another theme I found particularly powerful is accepting the limits of others. The limits of someone who experienced a trauma may be different from my own in the same way the limits of a dragon differ from those of a human. This book portrays this idea in a beautiful and clear way. I love how O’Neill continues to inject these powerful messages in her books.

If cute and quirky is your genre (or you’d like it to be!) I highly recommend adding one of O’Neill’s books to your reading list asap.

Okay, this settles it - Katie O'Neill is now one of my favourite artists. Her panels are gorgeous and this prequel to The Tea Dragon Society is a beauty! It has so many things to love: mythical creatures, tea, love, family and environmentalism. What I loved most was how O'Neill dealt with mature topics such as finding your calling, loving your family, gender identity, and protecting the environment - all while creating the most adorable tea dragons!

Overall, this is a beautiful books - in its story and its art. I can't wait to see what O'Neill comes up with next.

This graphic novel brings me so much joy. I love this world and I am so happy I got to visit it again. The art is so beautiful and getting to see the landscapes drawn out was amazing. The writing in this graphic novel is also superb, as it isn’t too complex while it is also not too simple. I hope that we get to continue going back to this world because I always leave with the warmest feeling inside and I finish reading with such a smile on my face.

Already starting out I love that the book is in both ASL and english. I have recently set a goal of learning some basic ASL and this is such a beautiful and inclusive way of doing so.

T.H.E. A.R.T. WOW. I’m in love. My twin sister (an art student) loves Katie O’Neill and went crazy when I told her I got an ARC (too bad she has to wait for the actual publication!) Even though I’m not an art student I love art and her style is absolutely stunning. With every page I just keep thinking... THIS MUST HAVE TAKEN FOREVER. The creatures are SO FREAKIN CUTE.

I’m officially obsessed with Katio O’Neill’s art and this tea dragon world!

This book was provided to me by Oni Press and NetGalley for a fair and honest review

I loved this book just as much as I did the first one, The Tea Dragon Society. Once again, the art doesn't fail. If you read my review for The Tea Dragon Festival you will know I can't draw worth anything. But I have very clear and defined things I like. And I LOVE the artwork that Katie O'Neill provides.

Story line - we get a some Hese and Erik! I'm loving these characters. It does take place before the The Tea Dragon Society, so we get a little more H&E backstory. Which is cute. This also has a real dragon (along with the tea dragons).

Things I've really loved about these two books: the LGBT aspect. It isn't overly obvious and very sweet and lovely. I'm also liking the diversity that is not brought up, but is there! The obvious racial relationships, but once gain, not shoved down the throats of the children that this book is geared too. But so lovely written, and I loved it!

Things I loved about The Tea Dragon Festival: It has sign language in it! The fact that everyone in this village learned it, because of the birth of one person is great! That's not something you see now. But very heart warming! There are many other things I loved about it, but won't spoi in my review. Needless to say, I recommend this book to everyone!

Thank you again to NetGalley and OniPress!

Absolutely amazing. The art work was beautiful as always and the story was just so cute. I absolutely adored it and need more tea dragons in my life. They really do make me wish they were real.

I remember hearing a lot of buzz around The Tea Dragon Society last year, particularly on Booktube, and it's always been in the back of my mind to pick it up and read it, but I hadn't gotten around to it... yet. When the opportunity to review The Tea Dragon Festival came up, I couldn't turn it down because everything I knew about the first book led me to believe it would be beautiful and whimsical and pretty much something I'd love.

And was a I right.

The Tea Dragon Festival is a wonderful tale of finding your place in your community and helping others as Rinn stumbles across a dragon who's been asleep for 80 years and feels out of place. Rinn is, in turn, trying to figure out their place within the community they've grown up in and together they begin to make sense of themselves and their world. Alongside Rinn and Aedhan, there's Rinn's uncle, Erik, and his partner Hesekiel, who are also finding their path, and all of this is set in a charming community village that's as naturally diverse as one we would come across in our daily lives.

That's one of the things that struck me most about this beautifully illustrated graphic novel - it's diversity. Everyone we meet has their own story, path and potential and the diverse range of characters never feels forced or like characters have been given traits simply to say 'Hey, I'm a diverse character.' There are characters who are on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, characters who are deaf (and there's an awesome little intro on how to read the signed conversation in the graphic novel to distinguish it from spoken conversation), old characters, young characters, a whole community of vegetarians... and of course, the tea dragons, themselves who have personalities of their own!

The storytelling is magical, and that's in part to the gorgeous art style, but also the setting and the way characters come together. You can't help but be drawn into the world. It's utterly charming and a wonderful way to spend an afternoon curled up on the couch reading.

My heart was completely stolen by the Tea Dragons - tiny dragons that represent different plants that can be used to make tea, and they all have their own little personalities that jump off the page. What's not to love about dragons and celebrating the drinking of tea?

I loved this instalment so much I immediately purchased a copy of The Tea Dragon Society online so I can read it. (I may have also shared a few pages of The Tea Dragon Festival with my class to get their thoughts on it... and they've been bugging me to continue reading it to them ever since!)

In a world full of books tackling heavy topics, this is a ray of sunshine that deftly handles the real world in beautiful way.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review



I love the <i>The Tea Dragon Society</i> so I jumped at the chance to read this. Katie O'Neill's art is so beautiful - whimsical, sweet and surprisingly full of hidden details. This story follows Rinn, a non-binary young villager who is training to apprentice as a village cook. What they are really good at however, is foraging. As a forager myself, I really loved seeing that in a book! The village the story centres around is very remote and cannot rely on outside supplies so everyone finds what they need from the forest and mountains, consequently the village is famed for its cookery - more or less a sacred occupation there. Rinn is foraging one day when they discover a sleeping dragon in a derelict hut. Things progress from there as Rinn befriends, Ahdren, the dragon, and two familiar (if you've read the first book) bounty hunters turn up to track whatever put him to sleep. This book is beautifully diverse - many different skin tones and ethnicities (and occasionally species) present on the page. One of the characters is deaf and the entire village uses ASL to communicate with her, which is shown on the page. I'd never seen that in a graphic novel before. The bounty hunters are a M/M couple and many background characters are also part of the rainbow spectrum of identity and sexuality. And of course the tea dragons themselves are present on almost every page.

I loved this book so much and I really just want an entire series of these books. Highly recommend and more please.

A brilliant and wonderfully illustrated book that I couldn't put down.
The story is sweet and well written, the graphic part is amazing.
It's the first book I read by these authors and it won't surely be the last.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This review has also been posted on Goodreads.

There is a small village, among the mountains, where people live a peaceful life, collecting food from the forest and taking care of the moody, naughty, wonderful <i>tea dragons</i>. What a surprise they'll have when, one day, they'll find a full-size dragon who's been asleep for 80 years and declares his duty to take care of the village and all its inhabitants!

This comic is a companion volume to the well-known and well-loved <i>Tea Dragon Society</i>, which I recently read and absolutely adored. The artwork, the colouring, the character design; the creatures, the dialogues, the wholesomeness and, last but not least, the effortless representation of every possible human (and not 😋) colour, orientation, disability... oh my! Great, beautiful, sweet experience!! 💜

I could not stress more how much I love this series! I feel blessed to have received this <i>arc</i>. I will recommend this book to absolutely everyone! Wonderful ❤️💛💚💙💜

This was so cute! I love everything from the art style to the storyline to the use of sign language! I’ve never seen sign language used in books like this before and it’s such a cool addition. I also love all of the diversity that’s included, there’s so many poc characters. The art is BEAUTIFUL and I couldn’t get enough of it. At this point, I’ll love anything Katie O’niell puts out. I love all of my little tea dragon babies.

Gentle and inclusive fantasy story with absolutely GORGEOUS illustrations. Prior familiarity with the series or the author is not needed at all.

This graphic novel is honestly the cutest and most inclusive book I have read. This follows a girl named Rinn who discovers a real dragon who fell asleep for 80 years and also follows Erik and Hesekiel as they come back home to investigate the mystery of his enchanted sleep.

I loved how there was sign language in this book and I think it was really well done and explained. I valued the information at the back of the book about sign language and where to locate more information and I think it's such a good way to show others what it is like. This book is just honestly such an important novel for young readers to read.

The art style for this book is breathtaking and all the colours are so vibrant and wonderful. The concept of the Tea Dragons is such an original idea and I am forever obsessed with it. This book will give you such a cosy feeling and is perfect for those rainy days.

I had received a copy of The Tea Dragon Society in my Owl Crate subscription box, and fell in love - it was such a sweet, calming book, one that I enjoyed immensely and even read a couple of times in one day. I knew there had to be more, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it to the release date of The Tea Dragon Festival; I'm incredibly grateful to the publish for the opportunity to read it sooner!

The Tea Dragon Festival was a delight to read from start to finish. The characters were endearing and unique, I (again) loved that there were LGBT characters, the tea dragon mythos is incredibly well crafted and interesting - I could read a whole book about different types of tea dragons! - and I love that the characters use a combination of ASL and spoken word to communicate. O'Neill has a wonderful way with her art that even when there are no words involved at all, the reader still feels so much. It's truly a world that you can lose yourself in, and I'm very thankful to O'Neill for sharing that with us all.