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A review by leafblade
Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry
4.0
I recieved an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I initially asked for this book because I had recently seen the Turkish movie Mustang, about five teenage sisters that lived with their controlling father. It quickly became a favorite coming of age story for me, and I have been looking for similar books, movies and tv shows ever since. This book was it, in the same way.
This book is a contemporary, set in a family of four sisters and a widowed dad. He has a lot of rules for the house they live in, and one of them is none of the girls can let any boys in the house, so the older has to sneak out of her room's window to see the various boys (and men) she's dating. One night she ends up dying while she was climbing down the tree outside of her window to go see her boyfriend, and so the plot starts. The little town they live in is almost exclusively latinx, and the story is told through feminist lenses, though it may not seem at first in the beginning because the message it's giving isn't exactly spelled out for the reader to see.
All of the sisters, even the dead one you don't even get to actually see throughout the book, have very distinct personalities and voices. The chapters alternate with their respective PoVs, and eventually one of a group of boys that live opposite them. If the chapters weren't named after the PoV girl, I would've still recognized which one of them it was.
Jessica is the second oldest after Ana, the one who died. So now she has to work to pay for the expenses that their drunk dad can't afford to pay. She's in a really really toxic relationship that I loved-hated reading about. Jessica is such a strong-minded person, but she became submissive when John was around, and some people are starting to notice.
Iridian kept her dead sister's books right after she died, so now her biggest passion is writing paranormal romance, and she does so whenever and wherever she can. She's the shy one, the snarky one, the look-at-me-and-I'll-bite-you one. I really liked her connection with Ana, because it wasn't as direct as the other two girls', but rather through books and stories and thinking what did Ana find in those that Iridian was not finding herself.
And then Rosa is the youngest one. She's like caught in fairyland: speaks to animals, to her sister's ghost, likes to feel for the hidden forces in everyone and everything. She spends the whole book chasing a wild animal that ran away from a zoo, just because she's like that.
What I found most interesting about this book was the everyday life of these three sisters after the death of the oldest one, seeing them cope and finding out through spread-out flashbacks what happened immediately after Ana died one year ago. I liked that we only got like one scene that was set in school, because I really don't think this book would've benefitted from being a high school drama. I think it's not even mentioned if Rosa goes to school or not. We focus on their neighborhood, Jessica's job at a pharmacy, and the church Rosa goes to every week, and that's it.
The paranormal bit was really well done. I loved that it wasn't explained that much, and that the sisters didn't get all detective-like when they found out what was happening. I liked what it meant for the boys that live opposite them, and I FUCKING LOVED John's scene with it near the end. It merged really well with the end of the story, and because it wasn't really flashy it didn't seem out of place.
What I didn't like was the lenght, lol. I would've made it 200 pages longer, so maybe we could've explored the side characters a bit more. Poor Walter didn't deserve to be in only like 10 pages.
I initially asked for this book because I had recently seen the Turkish movie Mustang, about five teenage sisters that lived with their controlling father. It quickly became a favorite coming of age story for me, and I have been looking for similar books, movies and tv shows ever since. This book was it, in the same way.
This book is a contemporary, set in a family of four sisters and a widowed dad. He has a lot of rules for the house they live in, and one of them is none of the girls can let any boys in the house, so the older has to sneak out of her room's window to see the various boys (and men) she's dating. One night she ends up dying while she was climbing down the tree outside of her window to go see her boyfriend, and so the plot starts. The little town they live in is almost exclusively latinx, and the story is told through feminist lenses, though it may not seem at first in the beginning because the message it's giving isn't exactly spelled out for the reader to see.
All of the sisters, even the dead one you don't even get to actually see throughout the book, have very distinct personalities and voices. The chapters alternate with their respective PoVs, and eventually one of a group of boys that live opposite them. If the chapters weren't named after the PoV girl, I would've still recognized which one of them it was.
Jessica is the second oldest after Ana, the one who died. So now she has to work to pay for the expenses that their drunk dad can't afford to pay. She's in a really really toxic relationship that I loved-hated reading about. Jessica is such a strong-minded person, but she became submissive when John was around, and some people are starting to notice.
Iridian kept her dead sister's books right after she died, so now her biggest passion is writing paranormal romance, and she does so whenever and wherever she can. She's the shy one, the snarky one, the look-at-me-and-I'll-bite-you one. I really liked her connection with Ana, because it wasn't as direct as the other two girls', but rather through books and stories and thinking what did Ana find in those that Iridian was not finding herself.
And then Rosa is the youngest one. She's like caught in fairyland: speaks to animals, to her sister's ghost, likes to feel for the hidden forces in everyone and everything. She spends the whole book chasing a wild animal that ran away from a zoo, just because she's like that.
What I found most interesting about this book was the everyday life of these three sisters after the death of the oldest one, seeing them cope and finding out through spread-out flashbacks what happened immediately after Ana died one year ago. I liked that we only got like one scene that was set in school, because I really don't think this book would've benefitted from being a high school drama. I think it's not even mentioned if Rosa goes to school or not. We focus on their neighborhood, Jessica's job at a pharmacy, and the church Rosa goes to every week, and that's it.
The paranormal bit was really well done. I loved that it wasn't explained that much, and that the sisters didn't get all detective-like when they found out what was happening. I liked what it meant for the boys that live opposite them, and I FUCKING LOVED John's scene with it near the end. It merged really well with the end of the story, and because it wasn't really flashy it didn't seem out of place.
What I didn't like was the lenght, lol. I would've made it 200 pages longer, so maybe we could've explored the side characters a bit more. Poor Walter didn't deserve to be in only like 10 pages.