FLASHLIGHT
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub
A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
“Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
“In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life—the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures—are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.”
—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
“In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe.”
—Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls
“Flashlight is a sensitive familial portrait, rigorous in its scope and complexity of feeling. Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“I devoured Flashlight. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The plot builds like a symphony rising to a crescendo, full of surprise and wonder. The story is as astonishing as it is entirely plausible. Susan Choi clearly knows well the fraught geopolitics of Korea and Japan, and did her homework.”
—Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
TRUST EXERCISE
WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2019 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, ELLE, Bustle, Town & Country, Publishers Weekly, The Millions, The Chicago Tribune, and Time.
“Mind-bending. . . . A Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to young generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory. . . . [Trust Exercise is] a perfectly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity. . . . It flexes its own meta-existence—as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative—brilliantly.”
—New York Magazine
“[Trust Exercise] burns more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest. . . . Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. . . . [A] delicious and, in its way, rather delicate . . . phosphorescent examination of sexual consent.”
—The New York Times
“An intelligent and layered portrait of a school’s legacy. . . . [Trust Exercise] makes something dramatic and memorable from the simple elements of a teen movie.”
—The New Yorker
“Perhaps the best [novel] this year. . . . [Trust Exercise] begins as an enthralling tale of teenage romance and then turns into a meticulously plotted interrogation of the state of the novel itself. . . . Read it once for pleasure, and then again to turn up all the brilliant Easter eggs.”
—Vulture
“Ingenious. . . . Choi’s prose is damp with tears and sweat, bruised with hurt and lust, sprinkled with sugar, salt, and e-numbers. Hormones practically drip off the page. . . . [But] then, suddenly and without warning, Choi executes a bravura bait-and-switch. . . . Sure, submitting to it is a ‘trust exercise’ all of its own, but the razzmatazz that awaits is well worth it.”
—The Financial Times
“Magic. . . . This mind-bending book is worth the wait as Choi challenges readers to consider the boundaries between fiction and reality.”
—TIME
“Masterly. . . . [Choi has] taken the issues raised by #MeToo and shown them as inextricable from more universal questions about taking a major role in someone else’s life, while knowing that we’re offering only a minor part in return. . . . With consummate wit, punchiness and feeling, [Choi] shows how much we need our female novelists within the sea change of our current moment.”
—The Guardian
“An elaborate trick; [Trust Exercise] is a meta work of construction and deconstruction, building a persuasive fictional world and then showing you the girders, the scaffolding underneath, and how it’s all been welded together. It’s also a work that lives in the gray area between art and reality: the space where alchemy happens.”
—The Atlantic
“Book groups, meet your next selection. . . . Trust Exercise is fiction that contains multiple truths and lies. Working with such common material, Choi has produced something uncommonly thought-provoking.”
—NPR
“Electrifying. . . . [A] story that cuts to the heart of gender politics and the teacher-student dynamic.”
—People
“A gonzo literary performance one could mistake for a magic trick, duping its readers with glee before leaving them impossibly moved. . . . Facts are debated in Trust Exercise, yes, but Choi always tells the truth.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“In her masterful, twisty [novel], Susan Choi upgrades the familiar coming-of-age story with remarkable command . . . [displaying her] talent for taking ineffable emotions and giving them an oaken solidity. . . . So many books and films present teenage years as a passing phase, a hormonal storm that passes in time. Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of it more like an earthquake—a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.”
—USA Today
“A twisting feat of storytelling. . . . [Choi] uses language brilliantly. . . . She is an astute, forensic cartographer of human nature; her characters are both sympathetic and appalling. In the end, [Trust Exercise] is a tale of missed connection and manipulation—and of willing surrender to the lure and peril of the unknown.”
—The Economist
“Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings. . . . [Choi is] a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack. . . . How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated, and remembered. . . . The result is a dramatic exploration of the distorting forces of memory, envy, and art. . . . You won’t be disappointed.”
—The Washington Post
“Compulsively readable and formally brilliant: this is basically a literary unicorn.”
—Lit Hub
“Sharp, wily. . . . Trust Exercise busts out of its coming-of-age shell and becomes a stranger and far more marvelous creature.”
—Slate
“Choi, a master novelist, takes advantage of her prose’s magnetic qualities. . . . Kaleidoscopic. . . . Prepare for an ending that will make you question everything.”
—Refinery29
“A rare and splendid literary creature: piercingly intelligent, engrossingly entertaining, and so masterfully intricate that only after you finish it, stunned, can you step back and marvel.”
—The Boston Globe
“[As readers] we find ourselves doubting everything we previously took as fact. It’s dark, evocative, and fun.”
—BuzzFeed
“A Russian doll of a novel. . . [A] clever and ultimately delightful set of narratives tucked inside one another in a complex take on truth and art, and the grey area in between.”
—The Telegraph (UK)
“Choi captures this awkward, vulnerable stage [of maturity] perfectly—the shifts in peer loyalty, the perilous allure of adults. . . . Dazzling.”
—The Mail on Sunday (UK)
“One of the most insightful commentaries on life in the #MeToo era.”
—Vogue (UK)
“A fun twisty treat. . . . You’ll definitely want to read with a friend to trade reactions and hot takes.”
—Book Riot
“A punchy, hotly anticipated novel. . . . Strap in for a wild ride.”
—Town & Country
“Fresh, nuanced. . . . Choi writes passages of real beauty, some of which stumble forth raw and unformed, fragments and observations that double back, accreting. Other times she deploys descriptions that feel more planned out and note perfect.”
—amNY
“Fans of experimental plot structure will find much to love in [this] spellbinding new novel.”
—Elle
“A feat. . . . [Trust Exercise] is bold. . . . There is innuendo and insinuation and a hint of sinister. . . . In the end, there’s no shortage of insight in this novel. Or pathos.”
—Bookforum
“[A] remarkable novel with a narrative twist that will knock you out.”
—Bustle
“Gets at questions of truth and fiction in a way that feels, this year, particularly relevant.”
—Vanity Fair
“Never have I ever encountered a narrative twist that caused me to question everything I’d just read.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Explosive. . . . [Trust Exercise] will linger long after the book ends.”
—The Observer
“This twisty novel . . . seems a straightforward enough story—until the roller-coaster second half makes you doubt everything that came before.”
—Marie Claire
“Immerses the reader in the suffocating hothouse atmosphere of a 1980s performing arts high school and all the intense drama, heartbreak, and scandal many remember from their teen years.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Riveting. . . . [Trust Exercise] will surely become a favorite with book clubs.”
—International Examiner
“A book you will very much want to discuss with other readers.”
—Newsday
“Superb, powerful . . . Choi’s themes—among them the long reverberations of adolescent experience, the complexities of consent and coercion, and the inherent unreliability of narratives—are timeless and resonant. Fiercely intelligent, impeccably written, and observed with searing insight, this novel is destined to be a classic.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“What begins as the story of obsessive first love between drama students at a competitive performing arts high school in the early 1980s twists into something much darker in Choi’s singular new novel . . . an effective interrogation of memory, the impossible gulf between accuracy and the stories we tell. . . . The writing (exquisite) and the observations (cuttingly accurate) make Choi’s latest both wrenching and one-of-a-kind. Never sentimental; always thrillingly alive.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Choi’s] finest novel. . . . Trust Exercise should immediately put readers on alert . . . exposing tenuous connections between fiction, truth, lies, and, of course, people. Literary deception rarely reads this well.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Choi toys with our trust but it pays off in dividends. . . . Trust us.”
—Broadway Direct
“Brilliant. . . . Trust Exercise deftly shifts time and perspective, and teen drama becomes a dark, edgy exploration of boundaries between coercion and consent, theater and reality, charisma and manipulation, and student and teacher.”
—The National Book Review
“An ingenious, morally complex exploration of how our youthful entanglements, cruelties, and traumas shape the rest of our lives. Choi’s writing is dazzling in its control and precision; this witty, sharp, unsettling novel grabs you and won’t let you go.”
—Dana Spiotta, National Book Award-nominated author of Eat the Document and Innocents and Others
“I can’t remember the last time I had such a visceral reaction to a book, or was so dazzled by a writer’s inventiveness with structure. Susan Choi is a master and Trust Exercise should be on every human’s reading list. A perfect knockout, with profound things to say about art-making, adolescence, and consent.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“This novel is a work of genius and should be a future classic. It has the most audacious narrative shift I’ve read since John Fowles’s The Collector. Plus, it includes the phrase ‘a virtuoso feeling-state lasagna’”
—Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida
“What a wickedly clever, formally inventive book Trust Exercise is. I was blown away by Susan Choi’s literary vision, not to mention her sensitivity and wit.”
—Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of All Grown Up and The Middlesteins
“As soon as I finished . . . [I was] desperate to talk about the novel with anyone else who’d read it. A startling, perplexing, fascinating book by a writer I’ve long been—and will always be—eager to read.”
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“Packed with the kind of shrewd psychological insights that make you sit up straighter, Trust Exercise is a frequently brilliant novel that draws you in slowly and carefully and then becomes increasingly hard to put down. I don’t want to give too much away, so all I’ll say is that the book is full of twists that are thrilling without being manipulative or melodramatic. I am sure I am far from the only one who had to put aside everything else while I raced to the end.”
—Adelle Waldman, nationally bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
“Trust Exercise is a brilliant and challenging novel, an uncanny evocation of the not-so-distant past that turns into a meditation on the slipperiness of memory and the ethics of storytelling. Susan Choi is a masterful novelist, who understands exactly where we are right now and how we got here.”
—Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Fletcher, The Leftovers, Little Children, and Election
MY EDUCATION
An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the author of American Woman and A Person of Interest
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.
My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.
“The academic novel married to the novel of obsession is almost too pleasurable to contemplate, but that’s what this book is…Choi’s an extremely confident writer, and in My Education she beautifully explores the way a young person tries, and often fails, to navigate her budding and intersecting sexual, intellectual, and emotional lives. The writing in this novel is masterful – but the book did something to me emotionally, too. I felt like I was in an obsessive relationship with it. I wanted to read it all the time.”
—Meg Wolitzer, npr.org
“Choi gets top marks for slyly re-inventing the affaire de l’Académie in My Education.”
—Vanity Fair
“A fascinating examination of sexual politics and the many disguises of desire.”
—The Daily Beast
“A scorching hot read… a chaise-lounge literary page-turner par excellence: sexy, smart, well-plotted, jammed with observations witty and profound, and so well-written it occasionally leaves you gasping.”
—New York Newsday
“A tricky book to categorize. On the one hand, it’s a campus novel… At the same time, this is just the background against which the larger story unfolds. What Choi is after is the elusive territory of experience, the way people and events imprint us when we’re young and then linger, exerting a subtle pressure over how we live our lives.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Sizzling… a story filled with fiery love affairs, regrettable mistakes, and between-the-sheets scenes that blow 50 Shades of Grey out of the water.”
—self.com
“Explores a young heart and its painfully naïve and bold ways…It’s The Graduate meets The L Word meets the Carey Mulligan flick An Education.”
—Marie Claire
“My Education is a raw, wild, hurtling foray into the tangled realms of sexuality and self-knowledge. Susan Choi’s vast gifts as a novelist are all on display, with her restlessness, curiosity and sheer daring leading the way.”
—Jennifer Egan
“When I finished Susan Choi’s My Education, I nearly gasped. She had managed one of the most exquisite of the novelist’s magic acts – produced a cogent, passionate, and surprising story, while acknowledging the ordinary, eroding aspects of lives lived daily. She had populated it with remarkable but utterly believable characters. She had written lines that could be framed, and displayed at a sentence festival. She has, in short, written an amazing book.”
—Michael Cunningham
A PERSON OF INTEREST
With its propulsive drive, vividly realized characters, and profound observations about soul and society, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Susan Choi’s novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important novelists chronicling the American experience. Intricately plotted and psychologically acute, A Person of Interest exposes the fault lines of paranoia and dread that have fractured American life and asks how far one man must go to escape his regrets. Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician near retirement age would seem the last person to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee must endure the undermining power of suspicion and face the ghosts of his past.
“A tour de force . . . universal and raw and irresistibly sympathetic.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“With nuance, psychological acuity, and pitch-perfect writing, she tells the large-canvas story of paranoia in the age of terror and the smaller (but no less important) story of the cost of failed dreams and the damage we do to one another in the name of love.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Read A Person of Interest for one of the best reasons to read any fiction: to transcend the limitations of our own lives, to find out what it’s like to be someone else, to recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“A haunting meditation on the myriad forms of alienation . . . Choi’s reflections from Lee’s gruffly brittle point of view are as intricate and penetrating as the shifting intrigue surrounding the bomb.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A staggering story of love betrayed…. Subtle humor, emotional acuity, and breathtaking plot twists keep this tale of wounding secrets rolling as Choi’s brilliant calculus of revelation and forgiveness delivers a triumphant conclusion.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Her characters are complex, fully realized beings with nuanced inner lives….There is lyricism on every page.”
—Jessica Murphy, Poets & Writers
“Enthralling…Choi, with her almost surgically precise prose, establishes herself as a cultural provocateur a la DeLillo, but with a keen sense of psychological nuance.”
—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“Eloquent, penetrating… Behind the headlines that trigger Choi’s imagination, she sees intricate, difficult lives; she sees romance and error and dignity and pain— and finally, as with Lee, she sees the possibility of redemption.”
—Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Dazzling.”
—The New Yorker
“Superbly told…profound.”
—The Boston Globe
“Masterful…[Lee’s] dilemma is Hitchcockian, and one of the remarkable things about this novel is how seamlessly Choi integrates suspense with resonant characterization and elegant prose….With its passages of melancholic introspection and long flashbacks, A Person of Interest certainly isn’t a thriller, but since most contemporary literary fiction feels hopelessly static and ornamental by comparison, Choi seems to be working in a genre all her own: politically astute, historically based and dramatically propulsive.”
—Salon
“Incendiary…so smart.”
—Fresh Air
“Stunning…succeeds on so many levels”
—Village Voice
“…imaginative and deeply humanistic in such textured ways that the flameout of a marriage or two or three, the ruptures between parents and children, the storms of self-regret over what is lost in life, are as concussive as anything else in its pages.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“Private lives wrenched by official scrutiny.”
—Bloomberg
“If Henry James had lived in the age of pulp noirs, he might have wound up writing books a little like Susan Choi’s third novel, A Person of Interest.”
—Washington City Paper
“Psychologically rich”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Singular, nurturing power”
—The Chicago Sun-Times
“Gorgeous”
—The Oregonian
“Highly nuanced and rhythmically seamless prose”
—The Texas Observer
“The best new novel I’ve read in 2008”
—The Plain Dealer
“A famous American crime”
—Daily Gazette
“Two-word review: gripping, smart”
—GQ Magazine
“Terrible honesty”
—Dallas Morning News
“An endearing tangle of a man.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Clear, compassionate.”
—The Onion
“Mesmeric.”
—V Magazine
“Never loses its way.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Crackles…”
—Time Out New York
“Engrossing…masterful.”
—New York Sun
AMERICAN WOMAN
A novel of impressive scope and complexity, “American Woman is a thoughtful, meditative interrogation of…history and politics, of power and racism, and finally, of radicalism,” (San Francisco Chronicle). Perfect for readers who love Emma Cline’s novel, The Girls.
On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors’ ideology and joining their revolutionary cell.
“A brilliant read…astonishing in its honesty and confidence,” (Denver Post), American Woman explores the psychology of the young radicals, the intensity of their isolated existence, and the paranoia and fear that undermine their ideals.
“Susan Choi…proves herself a natural—a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn’t put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again.”
—Joan Didion
“With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments which bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri
“Historical sweep and startling particular shrewdness… Choi has written a fascinating portrait of dangerous fragility.”
—The New York Times
“Few writers since Graham Greene have brought such tender, insightful, poetic, intelligent, darkly comic writing to the political thriller.”
—Francisco Goldman
“A hypnotic, winding route through the scorched emotional landscape of 1974.”
—Village Voice
“Enthralling.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Intellectually provocative and vividly imagined.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Prepare to be held hostage by Susan Choi’s mesmerizing American Woman.”
—Vanity Fair
“A brilliant read … astonishing in its honesty and confidence American Woman is a haunting book.”
—The Denver Post
“Brilliant… Choi’s insightful understanding, vivid description, lyrical use of language and deft dialogue make it an overall reading pleasure.”
—The Oregonian
“An artful, insightful meditation on the radical impulse …a complex and layered work.”
—Newsday
THE FOREIGN STUDENT
Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening and a young man’s nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.
“Richly detailed. . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An auspicious debut novel . . . epic in its harrowing accounts of war and intimate in its charged descriptions of the unlikely love affair at its center.”
—The New Yorker
“First-time novelist Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully, and with striking maturity.”
—Time
“A luminous and accomplished first novel . . . that resonates with compassion-turned-ardor and an addictive melancholy vibrating beneath every line.”
—Houston Chronicle
“A novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Elegantly wrought.”
—Vanity Fair
CAMP TIGER
Imagination meets reality in this poetic and tender ode to childhood, illustrated by Caldecott Honor winner, John Rocco.
Every year, a boy and his family go camping at Mountain Pond.
Usually, they see things like an eagle fishing for his dinner, a salamander with red spots on its back, and chipmunks that come to steal food while the family sits by the campfire.
But this year is different. This year, the boy is going into first grade, and his mother is encouraging him to do things on his own, just like his older brother. And the most different thing of all . . . this year, a tiger comes to the woods.
With lyrical prose and dazzling art, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Susan Choi and Caldecott honor–winning artist John Rocco have created a moving and joyful ode to growing up.
“[A] resonant tale of family connectedness, burgeoning independence, and embracing the new and unknown.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A little boy finds his inner tiger in this lyrical picture-book debut by Choi, an award-winning author for adults… Elongated sentences demand that readers linger on each page drinking in every detail of the tiger’s striking portraits.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Youngsters will thrill at the possibilities presented in Pulitzer finalist Choi’s tale, which combines fantasy with the everyday.”
—Booklist (starred review)