A review by hirvimaki
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

3.0

Obreht has a gift with words; her sentences are lush and lyrical and beautiful. The careful way she crafts each paragraph shows an uncommon skill with language and from that I derived great enjoyment. But despite the beauty of how the words were strung together, I never found myself compelled to keep reading. Or to pick it up after I had set it aside. As pretty as the words were, the story they told - or tried to tell - lacked focus and interest. The stories within the story were interesting and had a good narrative, but the main story itself seemed to meander and get lost. And by the end I found that I really didn't care. That is not to say that I did not like the book - I liked it and some parts of it I even liked very much - but when I finished it it felt incomplete and I felt vaguely disappointed. I think I would have enjoyed two novelettes - the Tiger's Wife and The Deathless Man - much more than this shell that was wrapped around them about people I never got to know well enough to care about.