When You Trap a Tiger

Lily and her older sister Sam move with their mother to live with their grandmother, Halmoni, who is dying of brain cancer, and Lily starts seeing a huge tiger straight out of the Korean folktales Halmoni has always told her, a tiger that seems to know things about the family Lily does not. The tiger explains that Halmoni, years earlier, stole something precious from the tigers, sealed away inside a set of glass jars Halmoni calls her star jars, and it offers Lily a bargain: return what was taken and Halmoni will get better. What the jars actually hold turns out to be stories, painful pieces of the family's past that Halmoni locked away rather than lived with, about loss and sacrifice she never told anyone, and freeing them means Lily has to sit with grief and family history far heavier than she expected when she made the deal. As Lily opens jar after jar and listens to what spills out, she comes to understand that the tiger was never offering a cure so much as a way for Halmoni to stop running from her own past before she dies, and Halmoni does die by the book's end, but peacefully, surrounded by her family, having finally told Lily she is no longer afraid. The town holds a bake sale in Halmoni's memory afterward, echoing the kosa ritual foods Halmoni loved to make, a small, communal close to a story that never pretends the tiger's magic was ever going to save her.

Keller writes in a warm, folktale inflected voice that blends the contemporary and the mythic without much friction between them, and the book moves gently rather than urgently, more interested in grief and memory than in fantasy adventure for its own sake. It suits readers who want their fantasy to sit close to real loss, and families reading it with a child facing a grandparent's illness should know going in that the ending does not grant the magical cure the setup seems to promise.