The Night Tiger: The Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

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Set in 1931 Malaya, when Malaya (today’s Malaysia) was part of the British empire, The Night Tiger creates a world where wild beasts snatch victims in the night, numerology and homonyms impact key decisions, and dancehall girls adhere to a strict code of conduct while feigning interest in lonely men. Though the lovey dovey element in the book, which got stronger and stronger further in the story, I thought was less interesting and that brought the rating of this book down for me. Ji Lin and Ren's increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes. It was to pay a debt of forty Malayan dollars that my mother had incurred at a ruinously high interest rate. The romance ruined this novel for me: as hard as I tried to see past it and enjoy the rest, which truly was very good, I couldn’t get over how uncomfortable and gross Shin and Ji Lin were together, and it got even worse when her medical ambitions seemed to take a backseat to her love for her step-brother in the end.

Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. In their journey to keep a promise and discover the truth, Ren and Ji Lin's paths will cross in ways they will never forget. Both stories employ twins who become separated, and both have as their principal character a smart young woman. Leslie Rawlings performs an autopsy on Ambika and suspects she was first poisoned before the tiger mauled her body.Myth, folklore, oral histories and tradition, ritual, fate, the unstoppable current of what is meant to be — all of this comes to coalesce in an undeniably spectacular world of Choo’s creation.

The idea that the weretiger is not really a human at all, but an animal who's walking amongst us was interesting to me because it inverts our idea of what a shape shifter is. Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for.

But this was so well-written, with such engaging characters and interesting twists, that I couldn't . Before the doctor dies, he charges Ren with one request: to find his severed finger, missing from years ago, and place it with his deceased body. They have been an integral part of the Chinese ethos for millennia, and continue to serve as moral guidelines in contemporary life. I also liked how, at the end of the novel, you could still insist that everything was just a coincidence, or you could be completely caught up in the supernatural connections between Shin and Ji, between Ren and Yi, and between William and Lydia, and the danger of restless weretigers. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin plunges into an adventure full of secrets and superstitions.

Mining the rich setting of colonial Malaysia, Choo wonderfully combines a Holmes-esque plot with Chinese lore.

It’s not gory or gratuitous, but if Crazy Rich Asiansis the Singapore/Malaysia novel to make you hungry, The Night Tiger is the Singapore/Malaysia novel to kill your appetite. The plot hinges on reuniting a severed finger with a corpse, and the story includes multiple severed fingers, preserved organs in general, gruesome tiger attacks, murder, and medical descriptions.