Celebration of the Lunar New Year is Tuesday! We are entering Year of the Tiger, so to celebrate, here are some books for adults containing magical stories of tigers.
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang: One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo (playaway audio) (ebook) (digital audiobook): Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mothers Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for.Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former masters dying wish: that Ren find the mans finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his masters soul will wander the earth forever. As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths wracks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren’s increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes. The Night Tiger pulls us into a world of servants and masters, age-old superstition and modern idealism, sibling rivalry and forbidden love. But anchoring this dazzling, propulsive book is the intimate coming of age of a child and a young woman, each searching for their place in a society that would rather they stay invisible.
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (ebook) (digital audiobook): “When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.” The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history. Nghi Vo returns to the empire of Ahn and The Singing Hills Cycle in this mesmerizing, lush standalone follow-up to The Empress of Salt and Fortune– it’s set in the same world, but you don’t need to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one. There is yearning and discovery in this Scheherezade-like unfolding story of identity and perception. And it’s a small novella, ready for a quick read.
