When You Trap a Tiger, by Tae Keller

When You Trap a Tiger, by Tae Keller (Random House, middle grade, January 2020), is a lovely story of family, and love, and loss, and how kids try to make sense of things that are beyond their control.  It is poised right at the tipping point between fantasy and realistic fiction; it's one of the few middle grade books I would call "magical realism," about which more later.

Lily's mom has uprooted her and her big sister, Sam, from California to move in with their halmoni (Korean for grandmother) up in Washington state.   Nothing has been explained to Lily, and she and Sam are confused and unhappy.  Their uncertainty grows when it becomes clear that all is not well with Halmoni.  And Lily has a worry of her own when she starts catching glimpses of a tiger.

The tiger is tied to the Korean stories Halmoni told the girls when they were little, of two sisters who were transformed into the sun and moon to escape from the fierce tiger threatening them. When Lily tells Halmoni what she's been seeing, instead of offering reassurance, her grandmother makes her even more anxious--long ago she stole stories from the tiger, and stashed them away in her collection of jars, to keep the sadness sealed away.  And when the tiger begins to speak to Lily, it tells her he's there to reclaim what was stolen.  

Lily thinks that if she can trap the tiger, she'll keep her grandmother safe.  But how do you trap a tiger that might or might not be real?  She's always been shy and quite, but her hunt for tiger trapping information leads her to friendship with a quirky boy she meets in the library, who's happy to help her.  Before the tiger is trapped, it offers her a deal--if she releases the stories, Halmoni will feel better.  And so Lily hears again from her grandmother all the bits of the story of the two sisters, but now she realizes there's more to the stories than little Lily had understood.

And her grandmother does feel better, with the release of the sadness of her past.  But it is not a cure.  Alongside the sadness, though, is a family coming together, and finding better understanding of themselves.  Lily moves past her image of herself as a stereotypical "quiet Asian girl," Sam moves past her prickliness back into a more loving pattern with her family, their mother unclenches from her tight tension.  They find community too, and so though the ending isn't happy, it isn't devastating.

It's a lovely paean to the power of stories, with Lily, an utterably loveable and relatable character, at the heart of it.  The tiger, clearly real to her, appearing and speaking to her throughout the book, becomes believable to the reader as well, even readers who "know" that tigers from stories don't just show up in real life.  Sam, her big sister, can't believe in the tiger, until its magic briefly, but clearly, impacts reality.  

I bristle when people call any fantasy or magic in the real world "magical realism."* In almost all real world fantasy, the characters clearly recognize what is magic and what isn't.  The tiger is real to Lily, though, and to label it fantasy seems like a denial of Lily's beliefs.  It's something that can't be explained that never-the-less is true.

If you love stories about stories, and family, and love, and grief, and tigers, read this beautiful book!

Ps:  unable to work it into my review, but wanting to mention it since positive LGBTQ representation isn't overly common in mg books: Sam, the big sister, has a lovely relationship beginning with another girl at the end of the book.

*for instance, I remember someone describing Laurel Snyder's book, Bigger Than a Breadbox, as magical realism.  I think that a breadbox that is a time travel portal isn't any sort of realism, but a straight up magical breadbox.  As I understand magical realism, which might or might not be what it really is, the un-real has to be seamlessly woven into the actual, and accepted as simply what is.  On the other hand, I would have to call this fantasy, because spirit tigers from stories don't talk to people in real life as I understand it. Along the same lines, if Christian saints appeared and started chatting, I'd call it fantasy, but since the characters might disagree, with this just being part of the world as they understood it, I'd label it magical realism.