Nine-year-old Bell once told her classmates that her long-gone mother Ling gave birth to her at a Mount Everest Base Camp, and she told her father she saw a family of baboons eating avocados on their roof. So when she claims to have seen a Siberian tiger behind the local Target, it makes sense that no one believes her. Her father Jay is a game warden who enforces wildlife laws regarding hunting, fishing, and the housing of exotic pets. Mounting evidence that a tiger truly is in their midst sends Jay on the hunt, but his daughter’s obsession with the creature makes him reluctant to kill it (in spite of pressure from his colleagues and community). This reticence is compounded by a lightning bolt-shaped fur pattern on the tiger’s face, which resembles a tattoo on Bell’s mother’s wrist.
Jay’s refusal to speak about Ling has pushed Bell away from him. Her absence is itself a presence in their story, pulling Jay and Bell along their parallel journeys of grief and acceptance. The intricacies of their interactions with each other, as well as the novel’s dynamic cast of determined game wardens, secretive animal “sanctuary” owners, and cruelly teasing school children carve out Jay and Bell’s full personalities while deepening the well of their emotional worlds. Chapters from the tiger’s point of view trace her rewilding, as she has spent her whole life in captivity but now relishes the freedom and intensity of surviving the “wild” of suburban Southern California.
Abundant lush details assemble into a robust setting. “The earthy funk of sagebrush” and the rippling of colliding streams evoke a strong, consistent sense of place. The juxtaposition of nature and civilization lies at the heart of the book’s themes, as Bell and Jay traverse the edges of the city and avoid tipping into the wildness of grief. Meanwhile, tense life-and-death scenes in which innocent people come face-to-face with the tiger (among other dangers) keep the suspense building until the explosive, moving conclusion. Even the subplots layer together seamlessly and push the characters—including those other than Bell and Jay—to choose between their stubborn connection to lessons they took from loss and the wild unknown of a more vulnerable future.
Adam Skolnick’s AMERICAN TIGER is an extraordinary, touching story about loss and reconnection as a winsome father-daughter pair navigates a gripping plot.
~ Aimee Jodoin for IndieReader