Review: The Night Tiger

“When people talked about being lucky, perhaps they simply wanted to feel powerful, as though they could manipulate fate.”

Presenting (in best circus announcer voice): The amazing! The incredible! The completely unexplainable novel!

So this book.

THIS book.

I cannot even try to explain what in the ever loving monkey pants type of book this is.

It is mythological.

It is romantic.

It is a thriller.

It is a mystery.

It is religious.

It is magic.

It is …

Amazing.

The Night Tiger is truly a story that incapsulates all the above genres and does it without being a 700+ page nightmare. How? I dunno. But it works.

This is another book that didn’t capture my impatient self at first. I had to calm down a bit and give it its due time. Glad I did because it is one of those stories that feels slow, maybe a little boring, maybe a little confusing, but somehow you can’t stop reading? (I’m the only one who experiences this? Probably).

It was just such an incredible adventure.

And the love story … slow burn and all the heart eyes.

The Night Tiger explores 1930s colonial Malaysia (or Malaya then) – a lush, tropical setting that I’ve never been to before. I highly recommend google searching some imagery to really set the tone for your imagination — especially of the architecture and the Batu Gajah General Hospital (where a lot the book takes place).

Once again we’ve got a fierce, independently powerful woman protagonist trying to carve space for herself in a world that damn near makes it impossible. While trying to untangle a complicated mystery and possessing a …. severed finger? I always gravitate to stories with powerful women. It keeps us remembering where we have come from and where we still need to go.

This book simply amazed me. I never knew where it was going to twist next and I was so wrapped up in the lush setting, the mythology, the mystery and the romance.

Definitely a favourite of 2019. Read it.

5*