Review: Tyger Tyger by Kersten Hamilton

Tyger Tyger is a young adult urban fantasy novel told with a unique, captivating style.

Teagan Wylltson isn’t your average teen, even at the beginning of the tale. Her part-time job is teaching sign language to chimps at the Chicago Zoo. Her life takes a left turn when charming Finn Mac Cumhaill arrives in her life, and the creatures of Irish mythology step out of the artwork in the books Tea’s mother writes and illustrates. Tea can avoid or ignore quite a few strange occurrences with Shadow Creatures but when her dad, a librarian, disappears, Finn, Tea, and Tea’s gifted little brother Aiden enter the otherworld of Mag Mell, dodging creepy creatures to rescue him. Like in many YA books, Tea learns something about herself throughout this story…but it isn’t what you might think.

A nice change from dragons and elves, Tyger Tyger delves deep into Mag Mell, a world of goblins, shapeshifters, and hellhounds, while keeping one foot in Chicago. Parents of younger YA readers may want to read this novel before handing it to their kids as there is a bit of language, innuendo, and violence. Altogether, I found Hamilton’s dialogue excellent and her prose tight and solid. So many times she packed a vivid picture into just one short sentence.

Kersten Hamilton has drawn on her childhood: tracking caribou and arctic wolves across her family’s homestead in Alaska, catching tiny tree frogs in the swamps and rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, and chasing dust devils and rattlesnakes across the high desert of New Mexico. She’s worked as a ranch hand, a lumberjack, a census taker, a wrangler for wilderness guides, and an archeological surveyor. Now that her children are all grown and off on their own adventures, she writes full time. Hamilton is the author of over a dozen middle grade and picture books for young readers. Tyger Tyger, available in November 2010 from Clarion, is her first Young Adult novel. Hopefully there will be more!

This book was offered to me as a digital ARC (Advance Reader Copy) through NetGalley for the purposes of this review. As always, the opinions expressed are mine alone.