Book Review: The Tiger's Wife

“Deftly walks the line between the realistic and the fantastical…In Obreht’s expert hands, the novel’s mythology, while rooted in a foreign world, comes to seem somehow familiar, like the dark fairy tales of our own youth, the kind that spooked us into reading them again and again…[Reveals] oddly comforting truths about death, belief in the impossible, and the art of letting go.” – O: The Oprah Magazine

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel. 

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for. (From Tea Obreht)

 Ages: 17+

Rated: I don't even know how to rate this, it is most definately a book that will be enjoyed more by adults than anyone younger than a late teen. Themes and issues deal with life, death, war, grief, mythology and family.

I will start this review with a recognition, this will be the first clearly adult book that I have written a review for. That is not to say that I do not regularly read books that are not YA themed, I most assuredly do, but I usually have to sit and digest books like this for quite a while, let my thoughts and understandings percolate and sift through my head for at least a few weeks. It has taken me over two months to think about this book before I can I was able to talk about this book beyond merely stating how absolutely amazingly beautiful this book was to read.

I read the Tiger's Wife on the heels of finishing up Secret Daughter, and was feeling understandably moody and weird. Secret Daughter is a very good book, but it left me feeling off. I immediately picked up Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obrecht, and was transported into a beautifully exotic world that I had first discovered as a child reading Zlata's Diary, and more recently in The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (which admittedly, I need to finish). A world that is more than a little broken by war, a little broken by cultural clashing, a little broken by history, but yet a world filled with love, hope, and mystery of a world not completely discovered.

Obreht does a beautiful job of intertwining three main stories together through the Tiger's Wife. The first is the story of Natalia, the young doctor looking for meaning relating to the death of her grandfather, told to us in the stories that he had passed down to her in her youth, and stories that she is trying to piece together into an almost autobiographical recounting of the amazing happenstances that her grandfather lived through, turning his life into a spectacular fable that leaves you breathless with awe and wonder. (Do you see what I mean? I keep on gushing.). The first story that Natalia recounts is the one of Gavran Gailé, the "deathless man" that her grandfather sometimes encountered, who collected the souls of the dead. The second story concerns a tiger that escaped from a zoo in World War II, making its careful way to a small village in the mountains that her Grandfather lived in as a small child. Prejudice, fear, and ignorance shape the dealings of the villagers with the tiger, and the young deaf-mute girl that it seemingly befriends.

All three stories are told in a disjointed manner, jumping from the present to the past as easily as we turn the page. Even the stories themselves, as recounted by Natalia, are not told in a consecutive manner. Sometimes she goes back and tells stories that take place before her grandfather's life fable. I say fable because it is so clearly and awesomely fantastical. Stories that Natalia couldn't possibly know, but that fit snugly into the holes that she is trying to fill in. Her grandfather as a child, enraptured by the Tiger come to life from the pages of the Jungle Book, her grand father as a doctor during yet another, earlier war, meeting a man who attracts calamity and death just as he he continues to fail at attracting his own death, her grandfather as an old man telling her his stories, her grandfather as a dead man who has left the final story unfinished.

The Tiger’s Wife never lets us forget that stories have the ability to transcend all manner of reality, whether it teeters on depression or reaches ecstatic heights. Like any good sorcerer, the spell Obreht casts is strong enough to circumvent flaws, and to invite the reader to hope she’ll continue honing her literary magic with even greater depth and care. (From The National Post).

I hope that is clear that this is a story that I am still thinking about. A story that I am still trying to understand. And ultimately, it is a story that I am talking about. The Tiger's Wife is a beautiful read. I hope it takes you on a beautiful journey.

Grade: A+

Book Review: Cinder

“Author Marissa Meyer rocks the fractured fairy tale genre with a sci-fi twist on Cinderella.”

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, the ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . . 

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future (From Goodreads).

Ages: Young Adult (Although reasonably, I would say any girl, and I do mean girl, would be able to read this  by 11-12 years of age. And get it. And like it).

Rated: PG with a teeny tiny touch  of 13, but so negligible to not even see it if you blink. 

Cinder is woefully, and most obviously, a retelling of a well known, much beloved, classic of a fairy-tale, Cinderella. I say woefully, because it seems to me that everyone is talking about how freaking awesome of a rebooted version it is. And honestly? Cinder is like, totally rocking brah. No really, Cinder is great. But it is great without focusing on the preexisting narrative of an orphaned girl being aided by mystical means to marry the prince of her dreams. Er, excuse the rhyme there. 

So what do I want to talk about here? I want to talk about Cinder. I want to talk about society. I want to talk about how refreshing it is to read a book by someone with the last name of 'Meyer' that does not make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. I want to talk about family. And mostly, I want to talk about how awesome Cinder is as a realistic individual reacting to extraordinary events. 

See? Girls can be mechanics too!
Although I seriously doubt ANY mechanic would
wear open toed shoes, let alone HEELS. 

So Cinder is a mechanic. A really fabulous mechanic, considering she is sixteen years old, has seemingly never had a formal education of any kind, but-- she is also a cyborg. In this slightly dystopic future, cyborgs have no legal rights as a human being, as they are not fully human. Regardless of being born 100% human, after an accident that would leave them mutilated and unable to work, the introduction of machinery into their bodies renders them less than human. Problematic? I'd say so. On a not so subtle level, Cinder is about humanity, and how we judge humanity, how we think about who qualifies as human, and how, despite all the information in front of us, we can dismiss individuals as less than human because they do not fit into our constructs of human. *cough cough* slavery *cough cough*. 

In the opening of the novel, we see Cinder sitting in her booth in the market place of New Beijing, fixing things, and trying to avoid attention to the fact that she is a cyborg. Everything is normal. Nothing looks like it  will ever change for better or for worse, until the day that Prince Kai, he of the dreamy dreams of dreaming teens, shows up with a mysteriously nonfunctional 'droid. Is it the classic boy meets girl, boy and girl like each other, but extreme obstacles block their path? You betcha! There is a plague ravaging the country, there is a threat of war from the Lunar Queen Levena, a weird subplot with mind control(?), and of course, the no small issue that Cinder is part cyborg. 38 % in fact. She is such a social reject. Ugh, gross. 

There is of course, a ball. Cinder is, of course, not allowed to go. Because, her step-mother is such a witch (Although as a side note, I felt no small amount of sympathy for Adri, because I felt like her reasons for disliking Cinder were never fully explained, and were probably based around the why's and how's of how Cinder became a cyborg). There is of course an orange chariot, that is magically transformed into a cool ride by, of course, a fairy god mo- No. Cinder is indeed, disallowed attendance at the ball. But there is no 'fairy godmother'. Cinder is remarkably self sufficient, and kick ass. She likes a Prince, and he likes her, but she has all the believable characteristics of a teenage girl in serious like with a someone she considers to be so far out of her league that he's practically in orbit. And of course, she is hung up on her looks in a normal teenage way, only instead of obsessing over how small her boobs looks, she's concerned about her robotic appendages, and anyone noticing them. 

From "Glitches"- a short prequel to Cinder. You can check

it out here.

Moving on.

One of my favorite characters in the book was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, not a human to any degree of imagination. And 'her' name is Iko. Iko is Cinder's android partner and only, who helps her run her mechanic business, and does whatever tasks and chores Linh Adri decrees. She is fun, ridiculous, and quirky. Kind of like the sassy best friend you see in all those tween Disney shows, funny, friendly, but one dimensional. Due to a malfunctioning personality chip, Iko really does embody the characteristics of a human servant, with little self mutterings against her employer/owner, enjoyment of trying on the pretty things that belong to the 'Mistress', and a delightful lusting after the ever handsome Prince Kai. 

I do not want to talk much about the plot. I would totally ruin it for you. But the villains, human, alien, and microscopic, are believable. The hero is fighting to keep his kingdom safe from two of the three. The heroine is fighting all three. Ever the two shall meet? I won't say. I will say that this book is a great read. It was fast paced, the characters where all interesting and multifaceted. It ticked off all my boxes for 'Strong Female Lead'. And best of all, it left me waiting in extreme anticipation for the next book. 

Grade: A- Because I am grumpy.