Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry
Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-61620-896-7 $17.95
E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-6437-5054-5 $9.99
Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 8-12
It’s been a year since Ana Torres fell to her death from her bedroom window, [End Page 310] and her sister Jessica takes care of their drunken father while dating John, Ana’s ex-boyfriend; other sister Iridian refuses to leave the house, instead reading Ana’s romance novels; and youngest sister Rosa searches for Ana’s spirit in the streets and parks around their house. Luckily for her, Ana’s ghost does make an appearance, but she’s angry, writing on the wall, cackling and throwing stones; each of the Torres sisters has her own theory about the reason for her haunting, but guilt, shame, and fear have them hiding from one another. This is quietly searing tale of sisterly love and family secrets, of a grief so big it swallows its mourners up, blotting out the future and distorting the past. The book’s structure moves like contained chaos, jumping among timelines, focalizing through different sisters, and offering the first-person perspective of an unnamed neighborhood boy, all so that the reader never quite knows Ana but only witnesses the wreckage her death left behind. Mabry’s prose continues to be elegantly simple and profoundly evocative, and though the magical realism of her two previous novels (All the Wind in the World, BCCB 10/17, A Fierce and Subtle Poison, BCCB 6/16), is somewhat tuned down here, it exists nonetheless, an appealingly unsettling infusion of ambiguous faith and unexplained miracles.
