The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The Tiger's Wife is Tea Obreht's debut novel; Obreht has made some prestigious young writers to watch lists (she's only 25), and thus, her debut novel was highly anticipated by many and has received rave reviews. The novel is well written, but I must admit that I felt like the book was building up to an ending that never came. While there aren't any fairy tale overtones to the story, parts of it are heavily drawn from the Godfather Death fairy tale.

A doctor in an unnamed Balkan country still healing from a harrowing and brutal years long civil war that literally split the country in two, Natalia is on her way to inoculate the children of a remote and rural orphanage when she receives word that her beloved grandfather has died at a remote clinic nearby. What follows is Natalia's attempt to make sense of both her grandfather's life and his death, specifically why he died where he died. Natalia's grandfather's life and death are inexplicably tied to several encounters he had over the years with a mysterious man who seems to never age and who claims to be deathless. An encounter early in his life with a woman his village dubbed the tiger's wife and an escaped tiger feared by the village was also a thread that ran through her grandfather's entire life and all the stories he ever told.

The stories of Natalia's grandfather and the tiger's wife and the deathless man as well as the stories of the war years and a mysterious, illness riddled family determined to dig up an entire vineyard in a quest to find both the source and the cure of their illness expertly draw the reader in to this novel.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Comments

bookspersonally said…

Very interesting review, makes me curious whether the high expectations for this book worked against it in the end.

April 12, 2011 at 7:16 AM

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Search This Blog