** spoiler alert ** I have incredibly mixed feelings about this book and will try to articulate them to see if I can make some sense of the score I should assign.

The positives:

Obreht writes incredibly well, her descriptions are lush and evoked several visceral reactions. There is an underlying brutality that she writes about which contributes to the readers understanding of how the war affected and continues to affect those in the region. Several times I wondered if some of the detail was necessary or just over the top.

The story of the deathless man was intriguing. Initially someone mentioned vampires during the book club recommendation but I came to see him more as the Grim Reaper.

The negatives:
I still don't understand the intertwining stories and how they correlated. The title of the book is "The Tiger's Wife", yet the book's primary focus, while it does pertain to a tiger(s), is not about the wife. I had to go back and reread several sections multiple times to make sure I hadn't missed something as I was often lost in some of the sub-stories. I also felt like key pieces of the book were missing, the denouement per se. To the author's credit, she did wrap up quite a few things in the last 20 pages: the relationship with Zora, the death of her grandfather, and the Mora.

I am still perplexed by this novel, I want some sort of finish, or some reason why I actually read this book ll the way through.