Her mother presses her to go to the library to make friends, but Lily has never liked this library and is troubled that her mother doesn’t remember this fact. The jars hold the stories that she is returning, and she must listen to the tiger tell each story as it is released. Lily will build a tiger trap, try to bake rice cakes, and carry star jars to the tiger. But real or not, the deal with the tiger is struck, and Lily begins her quest to save Halmoni’s life. I won’t offer again.” 4 There is no time to think about the deal, or even to think about whether the tiger is real, a figment of Lily’s imagination, or maybe a reaction to mental stress. If she will return the Korean folktales her Halmoni stole from the tigers long ago, the tiger will help Halmoni.

Early on, the tiger offers a Faustian deal to Lily. The genre serves to connect Lily with her heritage, and she learns as much from the magical elements as from her day-to-day life. The book is magical realism, a genre that blurs the line between what is real and what is magic (or fantasy). Lily certainly didn’t expect to be the only one in the car on that rainy night to see a tiger in the road, a tiger who will change Lily’s life. Neither girl was expecting to be abruptly uprooted to return to Sunbeam, so the mood in the car is decidedly cranky. Each of these stories has a measure of sadness based on the end-of-life issues the characters are dealing with.Īs Keller’s story begins, Lily’s mother is taking her and her sister Sam from their home in California to Sunbeam, Washington, where they had lived with Halmoni for three years after Dad died. Merci’s Cuban-American grandfather, Lolo, has Alzheimer’s disease Lily’s Korean grandmother, Halmoni, has cancer.

This middle grade story is similar to the 2019 Newbery winner, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, in that both books feature an ailing and dying grandparent. from their own perspective.” 3 Keller’s character Lily, the protagonist in this year’s Newbery winner, is, like Keller, Korean American. Keller is an Own Voices author, which is “an author from a. When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller is the recipient of the 2021 ALA Newbery Award 1 as well as the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature. (Note: It is not the purpose of this review to draw conclusions for the reader but rather to focus on literary elements and topics of importance for the Christian audience.)

When you trap a tiger genre