Thursday, December 28, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera




The Tiger's Daughter is a fantastic example of the Fantasy Romance genre.  It's a complete fusion of both genres - this is clearly a fantasy novel - featuring demons, divinely gifted rulers, and incredible warriors - but the main focus of the story is of the journeys of the two main characters and their attempts to try to make their love work despite their differences and the troubles that come their way.  And god did I love the two main characters.  As I've said before, a good romance plot will have moments where the reader will both want to stop reading because the reader doesn't want to see the characters get hurt but also not want to stop because the reader wants to know what happens to those characters anyway - and the Tiger's Daughter has those moments in spades.

Please note that the plot summary/description on Amazon is totally misleading - as noted above, this is more of a fantasy love story than a fantasy adventure story, which the summary would have you believe.  If you're looking for an adventure story, you're looking in the wrong place.  But if you don't mind a love story in the fantasy genre, you will love the Tiger's Daughter.

Final Note:  The Tiger's Daughter is clearly a Chinese/Mongolian fantasy world, though the author is Puerto Rican/American.  I think the setting/characters are done tastefully, but as my heritage is neither of those cultures, it's possible I'm missing something.  That's all I'll say about in this review as that's all I'm able to contribute on this topic.  


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O-Shizuka, the Empress of Hokkaro, was fated to do great things.  The niece of the ruling Emperor and the daughter of Hokkaro's greatest warrior (her mother) and its greatest poet (her father), she was born on the Eighth day of the Eighth Month (at the eighth minute of the eighth bell...), an auspicious time signifying her divine prominence.  But she rules in misery, until one day a letter in the from of a book comes to her written seemingly in the language characters of the Qorin, the horse-riding people who roam the steppes.  The book contains the writing of Shizuka's closest companion, Shefali Alshar, and her story of the events that drove them together....and have now kept them apart.

Shefali was fated to rule the Qorin, the horse-riding people who roam the steppes outside and inside Hokkaro.  Her mother had united the Qorin people to defend themselves against the Hokkaro's aggression and then thrown away her title (but not her leadership) to marry a Hokkaro man to create a peace that would allow the Qorin to recover from the war.  And together with Shizuka's mother, Shizuru, her mother slayed one of the Traitor's demon generals.  But the two girls were tied together even from birth, when they were both born with the same omen: two pine needles between their eyes.

Joined together by fate, Shizuka and Shelafi  grew up together, sometimes in Shizuka's Imperial Palace, and sometimes on the Steppes with the Qorin.  As they grew, they turned into fierce warriors, facing down Tigers, Bandits, and Demons.  And over time, they began to fall in love with one another, despite the Imperial rule against such a relationship.  But the world is not such a kind place to lovers with such great destinies. 

What happened in the past to separate the two and leave the empress all alone?  And is Shefali's story a sign of a future reunion or of further misery to come?
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Again, it's hard to describe this book without spoiling, but I want to emphasize that while this IS a fantasy novel (unlike a book that I reviewed earlier this month, The Beautiful Ones, which only contained minor fantasy elements), it is mainly a LOVE STORY.  In fact, the book time skips over several grand adventures made by the main characters* in order to focus on the relationship between the two characters - this story is about them, not the adventure.

*The Plot Summary for the sequel on Amazon seems to suggest that some of these adventures will be filled in in that book, but given how misleading the plot summary is for this book, I'm not sure that's accurate.

This is the story of Shefali and Shizuka as they grew up and fell in love and fought to stay together in the face of horrible adversity, which has seemingly split them up as the story has began.  The story is told mainly (90% really) through Shefali's perspective in her letter, although there are six interludes where the Empress reflects on some events that occurred in the interim or from her own perspective.  Oddly, the framing device works really well when you might think it wouldn't - even though Shizuka was THERE for most of the events described in the letter, Shefali is such a shy girl/woman that it makes sense that Shefali would want to describe her unspoken thoughts to Shizuka and that Shizuka would be breathlessly rereading the events.

But of course what really makes it work is that Shizuka and Shefali are just such phenomenal characters.  They're such delightful contrasts - Shefali is shy and often insecure (although she's more confident in her own abilities than she'll admit) while Shizuka has seemingly boundless confidence and an utter disregard for anyone (other than Shefali) who might possibly stand in her way.  Shizuka is a bit spoiled, while Shefali is absolutely not.  And yet each of them has a strong unique voice and character that makes them really great for each other, and it didn't take very long for me to start really caring about both of them (which is rough due to the framing device making it clear that at some point, things went south).

Even the minor characters are excellent - from the short timespans we spend with Shizuka's parents, to Shefali's mother, the deadly warlord Burqila Alshara - who is absolutely incredible, to Shefali's cousin Otgar and her brother and his wife....each of these characters feels like they're having their own stories on the side that we're missing out on, but what we do see makes them feel truly real.  The book incidentally contains in the end a short story of the meeting between Shizuka's parents and the first meeting of the two protagonists' mothers, and it is just absolutely a blast.

The worldbuilding here is excellent as well, with descriptions painting vivid pictures of a fantasy world but not getting too involved so as to lose the pace.  Whether we're on the steppes, or at the Wall of Flowers, or at the Imperial Palace, everything feels right in place.  And the book ends nearly perfectly - if I had one complaint it'd be that it's almost TOO tidy of an ending but it's so deserved an ending that I just truly can't care to ding the book for it

This book is apparently the start of a new trilogy, but it's essentially stand-alone (as I mentioned above, the plot description for the second book sounds like it's a mid-quel, not an actual sequel) with a clear beginning and end.  It's the type of book where I kind of don't want there to be a sequel to possibly ruin things for the characters - it's simply beautiful as is.    Unless you don't like a love story, this book is an absolute must-read for me and one of my favorite books of the year.


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