Prodigal Tiger

[cornerofmadness]

Prodigal Tiger by Samantha Chong

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a 3.5 read and rounding up might have been a bit generous. There was a good idea in here but the world building failed it. Caro(line) was banished from the magic-using group she grew up in when she was 13 and sent to school in New York City, a huge change from Malaysia. It takes forever to even learn why this happened even though it seems important (and we still don't fully see the damage her actions had) because at 18 she's called back to Malaysia because her brother Aaron has gone missing and the ghosts are ready to use the Hungry Ghost Festival to take over the Island when the festival peeks in a week.

So we have immediate and intimate danger and a time clock and that should ratchet up tension. If I'm fair the action just keeps going, almost too much so. There's never a moment to take a breath. The Magic Council is the most dysfunctional group of leaders I've ever seen. Aaron is meant to take over as leader because the Chua has been leading for generations but Aaron is gone, taken by the ghosts of Chee and Kai Lisang pirates from Aaron and Caro's grandparents era (which seems way too close to today and I'm wondering if they were centuries old and this was much further back in time because we are given the idea that live extension is possible withe these wizards.

Caro doesn't want to be back. She doesn't want to lead. She only wants her brother. When she left five years ago, she said goodbye to no one including her non-magic friend Zaiti and her would-be boyfriend who got hurt by this mysterious failure of hers, J.J. who is a magical healer. Also in this are two of her other sort-of friends the twins Athena and Arabella who work for the council as combatant wizards.

Naturally getting Aaron back isn't going to be easy. Stopping the ghosts even harder still and then there's the whole idea of betrayal by people we should trust, secrets of past generations and the fact that Caro is incredibly annoying with the way she thinks she has to do everything alone, gets into too much trouble and pushes everyone away. A friendly ghost who is helping her calls her rude and reckless and she is to the point it is hard to connect with her (and I spent the entire book wondering why she and her brother and all their friends have Western names and no one else does. Maybe it's part of Malaysian culture but I wouldn't know that).

There was too many unanswered questions. Why is the magic divided between east and west of the Island? How does the magic even work in this? Why can't Caro use the island magic and why is hers different? All of this felt glazed over and the ending too messy on one hand and rather too pat on the other (I can't explain that without spoiling it). Maybe some of this would be understood by people knowing the Malaysian folklore but that's only a small part of the audience. It needed explained better. Don't get me wrong, this is not a bad YA novel by any means. It just needed the world building shored up and we needed to know why Caro's friends are her friends because she really doesn't treat anyone well.

I had received an arc of this from Netgalley



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