Tigers in Red Weather Author:Liza Klaussmann Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real live... more »s': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war. Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena--with their children, Daisy and Ed--try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same. Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.« less
Cousins Nick and Helena have high expectations for their "real" lives after WWII. The women are disappointed when secrets and lies keep surfacing. When their children find a body, the story turns sinister.
This debut author very credibly built suspense to a compelling end.
Taking place between WWII and the end of the 1960s, Tigers in Red Weather is about two cousins - Nick and Helena - and their families. The novel explores how people change, how they interact with one another, and how everyones choices have an impact on other people.
Tigers in Red Weather teetered between being just average to downright boring. The characters are cardboard and unoriginal, the dialogue is uninteresting and everyone has the same voice, and the shifts in chronology are clumsy and confusing. What disappointed me most, however, was that the author never surprised me.
The book is constructed in five parts, with the story being told from the perspective of five different principle characters. This could have been an opportunity for the author to twist things up a bit by making the reader see characters and events in an entirely different way. But in each story, everything remains exactly as I had perceived in it the previous narrative(s). The best word to describe the book is: predictable.
All in all, it felt like the author was playing it safe and simply applying how to write a novel formulas she learned at university. I think if she is willing to be a bit more daring and edgy in her next work, she will prove to have talent that isnt exhibited in this debut novel.
