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Book Review: The Tiger Rising
Sep. 16th, 2011 09:02 amThey have nothing for me to do this week, but fortunately there’s plenty of reading material: right down the hall there’s a reading resource room, which has a reading corner with a big beanbag and two butterfly chairs and three overflowing bookcases, and more bookshelves marching around the perimeter of the room.
Given such abundance, it’s a bitter cruelty that I borrowed Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising. I picked it because the cover features a girl riding a tiger, and let this be a lesson to us all about choosing books by their covers because about five pages into the story it’s obvious nothing as awesome as tiger-riding is ever, ever going to happen. DiCamillo is gunning to write the most depressing book in the world this side of Bridge to Terabithia.
And, let me say this for her, she SUCCEEDS. When we meet our hero, Rob, he’s living a miserable stunted life at a rundown motel in an ever-raining Florida, going to a school where bullying is the only extracurricular activity. By the end he’s acquired a friend, but otherwise his life is headed downhill: school’s still awful, but it might not matter because his actions are probably going to get them kicked out of their miserable little motel by its vile owner, so maybe they’re going to have to move anyway.
She even contrives to make sunshine symbolic of sadness. Just in case you were hoping that it might be possible to wring some joy from the corners of the world.
And! As if that weren’t enough! ( Spoilers, just in case you care at this point. )
Yeah. Unless you’re looking for a read that will cast a grim gray pall over the world, I would steer clear of this book.
Given such abundance, it’s a bitter cruelty that I borrowed Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising. I picked it because the cover features a girl riding a tiger, and let this be a lesson to us all about choosing books by their covers because about five pages into the story it’s obvious nothing as awesome as tiger-riding is ever, ever going to happen. DiCamillo is gunning to write the most depressing book in the world this side of Bridge to Terabithia.
And, let me say this for her, she SUCCEEDS. When we meet our hero, Rob, he’s living a miserable stunted life at a rundown motel in an ever-raining Florida, going to a school where bullying is the only extracurricular activity. By the end he’s acquired a friend, but otherwise his life is headed downhill: school’s still awful, but it might not matter because his actions are probably going to get them kicked out of their miserable little motel by its vile owner, so maybe they’re going to have to move anyway.
She even contrives to make sunshine symbolic of sadness. Just in case you were hoping that it might be possible to wring some joy from the corners of the world.
And! As if that weren’t enough! ( Spoilers, just in case you care at this point. )
Yeah. Unless you’re looking for a read that will cast a grim gray pall over the world, I would steer clear of this book.
