Tigers, Not Daughters

Starred review from January 13, 2020
Not long after she and her sisters tried to run away during San Antonio’s Fiesta celebration, Ana Torres, 17, fell from her bedroom window and died. A year later, her largely absent father, Rafe, has descended into grief, leaving his other daughters, Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa, to clean up his messes. Each sister copes differently with Ana’s death: Jessica, involved with Ana’s abusive former boyfriend, simmers with barely restrained anger; Iridian internalizes her pain and finds solace in reading and writing; and Rosa, who has an uncanny connection to the natural world and its creatures, seeks a hyena escaped from the zoo that she believes may be connected to Ana. When strange things start happening, the sisters think that Ana’s angry ghost may want something from them. Mabry (All the Wind in the World) peppers a few gut punches throughout a story largely grounded in the ordinary, and the stark contrasts highlight the eerie power of the otherworldly events. Leading up to the slightly ambiguous ending, the Latinx sisters’ multiple narratives read more like a series of vignettes than a cohesive whole. Still, Mabry speaks gracefully to the transformative power of grief and the often messy (even violent) road to letting go. Ages 14–up.

Narrator Luis Moreno's gentle voice provides grounding for an emotional story. It's told in the third-person narratives of the three Torres sisters, who feel trapped by their distraught father and their grief for Ana, their oldest sister, who fell from a window to her death. Moreno animates their sorrow and emotional distance as rage-filled Jessica tries to assume Ana's identity, Iridian loses herself in Ana's romance novels, and Rosa, the youngest, searches desperately for signs from Ana. Balancing them is Moreno's delivery of the first-person viewpoint of a distant but caring narrator, one of the neighborhood boys who witnesses the sisters' fascinating actions from across the street. When Ana's angry ghost returns, the sisters find a new unity. S.W. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine