“If it weren’t for us, Ana wouldn’t have died and her sisters wouldn’t have been forced to suffer at the hands of her angry ghost.”
Release Date: March 24, 2020
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
Price: $17.02 (hardcover)
Plot Summary:
The Torres sisters dream of escape. Escape from their needy and despotic widowed father, and from their San Antonio neighborhood, full of old San Antonio families and all the traditions and expectations that go along with them. In the summer after her senior year of high school, Ana, the oldest sister, falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three younger sisters, Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa, are still consumed by grief and haunted by their sister’s memory. Their dream of leaving Southtown now seems out of reach. But then strange things start happening around the house: mysterious laughter, mysterious shadows, mysterious writing on the walls. The sisters begin to wonder if Ana really is haunting them, trying to send them a message—and what exactly she’s trying to say.
In a stunning follow-up to her National Book Award–longlisted novel All the Wind in the World, Samantha Mabry weaves an aching, magical novel that is one part family drama, one part ghost story, and one part love story.
Grade: A+
Review:
Despite the fact that this novel is being marketed as a modern version of Little Women (there are four sisters after all), that’s the only resemblance the novel had with the literary classic we all know and love. Instead, this novel reminded me more of The Virgin Suicides with the ongoing ennui that the Torres sisters have to deal with after the death of their beloved older sister, Ana. The fact that a group of neighborhood boys are always watching and obsessing over the sisters, adds on to the resemblance between the two novels. Some reviewers have considered this novel as a retelling of King Lear, since the father figure in this book is quite questionable, unreliable, and just lacks any real parenting skills.
However, with all these comparisons being made, Tigers, Not Daughters is a unique ghost story. Because ultimately, this is what the book is about, the ghost of Ana Torres haunting the lives and house of the remaining Torres sisters, Iridian, Jessica, and Rosa. The book is told in four points of views, from Peter’s (one of the boys that’s always hanging out at Hector’s house who lives fairly close to the Torres family as they have a good view of all the happenings that go on in the household), Rosa, Iridian, and Jessica.
I’ll admit that I enjoyed Iridian’s and Jessica’s points of view much more than the other two. Iridian was obsessed with Anne Rice’s novel The Witching Hour, and spent most of the novel re-reading that book and trying to write her own supernatural romance, while Jessica was the so-called mean sister filled with anger, but that after Ana’s death tried to fit into the void that Ana left behind to the point of wearing her sister’s makeup, taking up residence in her former room, and even going as far as dating Ana’s boyfriend.
The haunting is slow like a Southern Gothic novel (although it takes place in San Antonio in a predominantly Latino community). There are a lot of creepy moments and an underlying feeling of dread that coats this novel in a claustrophobic clutch and doesn’t let you go till the very end.
You don’t read this novel merely for the plot alone, but rather to live through the dark chilling ride that it provides.
*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Algonquin Young Readers for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
The Inkblotters 
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