When You Trap a Tiger - Tae Keller

Our six year-old is an exceptional reader. I'm always on the lookout for new, good reading material for her. A while back I had heard that this book won the Newbery Medal. I wanted to get a copy for her, but couldn't since it was sold out! I completely forgot about it until last month when I came across it in a bookstore. I bought a copy and we just finished it tonight!

It turns out that the main character is a Korean-American girl (like my daughter) and her experience in her family at a very pivotal time in her life. I don't even want to say what the book is about, because it's nice to go into a new story completely oblivious to its contents. I want to just mention some things I appreciated about it.

I was pleasantly surprised about the characters and setting of the book being somewhat serendipitously similar to our own. Early on in the story I enjoyed that it importuned some reflection about our family's identity and heritage. But over the course of the story what I appreciated the most was that the narrator/main character voices her inner turmoil very plainly yet thoroughly. This inner monologue involves not only conflicts about her cultural identity, but also about mortality, friendship, puberty, sisterhood, coming of age, etc. The emotional terrain of this story is surprisingly deep and diverse, but without being too abstract or opaque. Tae Keller does a wonderful job of developing the plot from the point of view of a young person, which makes the story and its emotional depth accessible to a wide range of ages. It interweaves a lot of familiar coming-of-age themes within a unique Korean-American cultural context. I don't want to give anything away, but for me, Keller seems to masterfully evoke empathy for Korean-American experience in particular and the human experience in general.

The story is profoundly moving without being dark and grim. During the last few chapters of the book, I kept getting choked up. I had to stop reading, take a breath, and continue reading aloud with a warble in my voice. At one point I just had my daughter take over reading, but she insisted that I continue! She asked me why I was crying, and I was grateful to have a chance to talk about how art moves people. One night after we finished reading, I was putting the kids to bed and thought how one day I will be a memory to them---how these mundane moments now and all the life in them will be finished someday. It made me think about my parents and how they must have felt raising me.

This is the kind of book When You Trap a Tiger is---check it out!

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