The Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo

Kate DiCamillo has some writing habits that we truly envy. She writes every day at the same time, and produces at least a page or two of usable material. She continues to get together regularly with the same group of writers who’ve been meeting for years now to critique one another’s work. And she “hangs around” mentally with her characters until they tell their stories clearly enough for her to capture them faithfully on paper. These habits have paid off. DiCamillo’s first novel for young adults, Because of Winn-Dixie, was named a Newbery Honor Book, and won a handful of other awards too. DiCamillo’s latest, The Tiger Rising, is darker than her debut novel, tackling the tough stuff of death and divorce, pent-up sadness and open rage, and doing so literally and figuratively through the story’s characterization and its surprising plot. She meets her subject with clarity and resists the temptations of sentimentalism and melodrama. And she crafts characters that manage to be simultaneously quirky and colorful and engaging and believable. Rob, the protagonist who’s unable to express his grief over his mother’s death through any means other than an itchy rash on his legs, hovered about near DiCamillo’s writing life for years before finally materializing in The Tiger Rising. A word of warning, however: for kids who aren’t yet equipped with the emotional resilience to survive sad endings, it may be best to save this book for later. As one 12-year-old reader put it on Amazon.com, this book was “slow, dumb and hard to understand, it would have been a lot better if the tiger hadn’t been shot.”