heatherjchin 's review for:

When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller

5.0

---

Moving, insightful, raw, realistic, touching, thoughtful presentation of third culture kid balancing acts and identity crises. Love that halmoni isn’t painted as just one thing or just another thing. Beautiful weaving of magical realism and inner emotional worlds and journeys so that establishing clear lines between what is “real” or not is not only not the point, but counterintuitive to understanding and embracing these characters and their stories and journeys and lives. Having all sides of our identities and multi cultures validated like this is rare, especially in middle grade novels.