What readers think of The Tiger's Wife, plus links to write your own review.

This is a book you will be thinking about for weeks after you read it. The interwoven stories are fascinating, but the author leaves it to the reader to do a lot of the work of putting them together. The stories are metaphors for a larger theme, and I re-read many parts of the book at the end to figure out the overall meaning. I think that the author should probably have made her metaphors more apparent, but then again I have really enjoyed puzzling out my interpretation. The author is an incredible storyteller who can hold your interest even when you aren't sure where she is taking you.

I felt like this is a young writer aspiring to be like Hemingway: overly descriptive to the point of boredom, but unlike Hemingway in the sense that the dialogue is too short and she never seems to get to the point. It was like reading a story from a person with ADD, she jumped around a lot, and not in any way that made sense or seemed to pertain to the previous passage. And then she, without warning, goes back to the story she was telling five stories before. While her writing, when focused on one story, was descriptive and somewhat interesting, after getting 48 into the book, I still was not interested in continuing. To me, this book did not live up to the hype.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. It was exceptionally well written by one so young, a story about a young doctor, Natalia, who while on her way to an orphanage with inoculations finds out her beloved but terminally ill grandfather is dead. He was, however, in a place he should not have been and she sets out to find out why. She uses stories he had told her while growing up to help make sense of his death and the mystery of his location. In some places it got tiring reading about the old stories while trying to make sense of the new. Anyway I have mixed feelings about this book.