I cannot recommend this book. I have given it only two stars. I am almost thinking of giving this one star. I will be very specific in listing what disturbed me. Let me mention immediately that those readers who enjoy fantasy novels will enjoy this more than I did. The events are so fantastical that I cannot classify this as a book of magical realism, but rather fantasy! I love magical realism, but dislike fantasy.

The themes covered are war, Balkan myths, death and man’s relationship to animals. I feel the author, Téa Obreht, is too ambiguous. What is she trying to say? I do not want messages hammered into me, but in this novel you can think whatever you dam well please. In addition, Téa Obreht shocks the reader with gruesome events. Once again, I am not averse to books that expose horrible behavior or horrendous crimes of humanity, if there is a point to be made, if there is a lesson to be learned. Here I felt the prime goal was simply to shock. There are many gruesome events involving animals. You have been warned! I am not going to give you an excerpt. Some passages are utterly revolting. Animals eating themselves: was this necessary? If this did happen during the war, I want a note to anchor it to reality.

The author chose to not use real names of cities in the Balkans, although one can guess that it takes place at the Croatian / Bosnian border. Anyone would assume this is because she wants to express the universality of war’s horrors. Is that such a profound idea? Couldn’t the author have been a teeny bit more explicit? I found the author’s view expressed in an interview.

The plot concerns the relationship between a grandfather and his granddaughter. Both are doctors. At the beginning of the novel the grandfather dies. The book’s central plot line is the granddaughter’s search to understand the missing links in her grandfather’s life, to better understand who he was. This is done by flipping to the past. Past events are told as stories that have a fantastical character. Two primary stories concern a man that never dies and a woman who feeds a tiger escaped from the town’s closed zoo. I found it disorienting to constantly be flipping between different time periods and stories. The strange stories were long and detailed. The characters acted in ways beyond my comprehension, and I felt there was too much extraneous information. Is this another way of saying that I was not captivated by these stories?

While the villagers of Galina are reluctant to talk about the tiger and his wife, they will never hesitate to tell you stories of one of the lateral participants in their story. (page 239)

That was a nasty kick from me. Even the author herself states that “lateral participants” are depicted! And what a peculiar choice of words: lateral participants! I see them as minor, unimportant characters and I certainly do not have to know everything that has ever happened to them. . Better editing, please. Or if I am kind, let me just say that I personally could not feel empathy for them. .Perhaps one mist enjoy books of fantasy to enjoy this novel.

So what did I like in this book? Some lines beautifully describe a place. You see the landscapes. The author is great with coloring in the nuances. Natalia (the granddaughter) will travel to Brjevina, where her grandfather died:

It was a small seaside village forty kilometers east of the new border. We drove through red-roofed villages that clung to the lip of the sea, past churches and horse pastures, past steep plains bright with purple bellflowers, past sunlit waterfalls that thrust out of the sheer rock-face above the road. Ever so often we entered woodland, high pine forests dotted with olives and cypresses, the sea flashing like a knife where the forest fell away down the slope. (page 17)

I have driven along the Croatian coastline. This was a perfect description of what I saw.

And then there is a dog called Bis. I loved what he did. This too made me appreciate the book.

So maybe, if you like fantasy novels, you might have less trouble with this than I did……. For the reasons listed above, I cannot recommend it. I haven’t even gotten into a discussion of what the book supposedly has to say about death! IMO, nothing all that profound.