Amy Jo

Before reading it I knew very little about rock climbing aside from what I’ve learned from friends and a few trips to the climbing gym in school, so I didn’t really consider myself the ideal audience. If you don’t know, Tommy Caldwell was the first person, along with his partner Kevin Jorgensen, to free climb the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Just a few days into the trip, Caldwell and his group are woken by gun shots on the cliff face and they are taken captive — the country is experiencing major political unrest while they are climbing and they had unknowingly entered a war zone. Most of the book is about one man’s obsession with climbing the most difficult rock face in Yosemite Valley.

Between work trips a few times a year, trips to visit friends, and a vacation here and there, I’ve managed to visit quite a few amazing indie bookshops. I’ve met friends in bookstores (sometimes internet friends I’m meeting for the very first time), and I’ve also wandered the stacks and browsed for my next favorite book by myself. Independent bookstores are spots for author readings and signings, poetry readings, art shows, live music performances, book clubs, writing events, and so much more. In those last few photos alone, there’s a bookstore that hosts book clubs and writing nights on a regular basis, a bookstore owned by a literary coalition nonprofit, and a bookshop that is part of a larger literary nonprofit center that featured a “poetry gumball machine” that benefits an inmate writing program for a local prison and was also attached to an independent press.

There were bits of mysterious magical realism that reminded me of Allende, and the gorgeous writing and sweeping plot that reminded me at times of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. The book is full of fascinating myths and bits of culture, from weretigers to Chinese number superstitions to the romanticization of names. The plot was sweeping and full of mystery and a forbidden romance, but I also found myself completely caught up in these bits of mythology and culture. If you’re a fan of books that weave together different storylines, elements of reality and magic and history, big sweeping stories and will take you away for a while, I think The Night Tiger might be the right read for you.

I spend the whole book knowing there’s going to be a twist, and then even if it does surprise me, I’ve spent too much time anticipating it that it still manages to feel like a letdown. In my opinion (and also the opinion of my good friend @bookishmadeleine, who put it really well in her own review and in our discussions about this book), Looker is really more of a character study of a crumbling narrator than it is a thriller. It’s because the narrator is literally falling apart as we watch. Her grief and guilt was palpable and so well portrayed, from the beginning as she’s just starting to lose it, and at the end when she’s really gone over the edge.