**Thank you NetGalley and DAW Publishing for this ARC! All thoughts and opinions are my own.** 

Posted to: NetGalley and The StoryGraph (retail reviews pending release date)

Posted on: 24 February 2025 

 

4 out of 5 stars. 

 

Wow. 

Wow wow wow- where do I even start with my review on this one? I don’t think I have the right words to even begin to share how this read made me feel… I’ll try my best- 

 

I kind of requested Aunt Tigress on a whim after scrolling through NetGalley one day and seeing the cover. I’ve said it once and I’ll probably keep saying it- I judge books by their covers. I do! It’s an immediate eye-catcher, an attention grabber. A pretty cover doesn’t mean what’s inside will be equally as stunning though (eyeing the-book-that-shall-not-be-named that is still, unfortunately, sitting in a box waiting to be dropped off at a secondhand bookstore). That’s how I stumbled upon Aunt Tigress, however. When I was scrolling during a time I most certainly shouldn’t have been scrolling considering my backlog of ARCs that has yet to shrink, I saw this pretty cool looking cover that called me like a siren. 

I’m SO glad I fell for its song. 

 

Aunt Tigress, on the surface, is an urban fantasy with a hearty blend of myth, character, and intrigue. At its heart, it’s something so much more. In the summary alone, we know that there is a pretty vicious murder which seems to be the catalyst for everything set to happen. Tam’s Aunt Tigress is only an edge of the world within the pages though, as so much begins to unravel itself upon her death. 

Something that I noticed a few others touch on is the fact that there is a lot of other stories brought into the main plot line. These other stories break up chapters or are entire chapters themselves. I personally didn’t have an issue with the break of main story into a side, usually past, story before going back to the present. My slight (and I mean very vague because the style was new and intriguing and eventually became a favorite) issue was the way tenses changed mid-writing. A majority of the novel follows Tam in the first person point of view. When more characters come into the mix though, we shift into a third person point of view that switches back to Tam’s first person pov. As I mentioned though, once I got used to this shift, it actually gave the book another layer. It made it more immersive somehow, almost playing like flashback sequences in a TV show or movie. I think that’s why I began to enjoy these flips, because it was a really new the way to introduce important information without just dumping it awkwardly into dialogues. 

 

To shift gears from style to characters for a moment, I want to say that I also loved how we came to learn more about important people in the book. Each character, just about, received a glimpse back into their past. Again, I loved this form of storytelling because not only did we get to see and learn more about these characters, but it was also interesting the way we got to do so. There’s a reason, I’d say, for the set up of the storytelling in this, but to avoid spoilers I’ll leave that thought here. 

 

I don’t read urban fantasy too much, but this one was such a solid pick for me. I absolutely loved the blend of Chinese and First Nation mythology, and some history that just aches as you begin to see the threads connecting events to people. It was almost a mild commentary piece, too, in that it discusses some traumas that different people/groups of people go through (like attacks on a woman/misogyny, missing persons/the fact that authorities don’t care about certain demographics, lgbt+ discrimination, and angry father-figures/toxic households to name a few). ‘Aunt Tigress’ feels like it’s something more than just another fantasy or horror novel (which I loosely classify it as horror only because there were body horror depictions that I think push it over close enough near the horror genre), but again, I just don’t have the words to express just what it feels like to me. It’s a story, it’s a lesson, it’s a social piece, it’s a memory of a read that I don’t want to forget. It may not be for everybody, but I loved it so much and I can’t wait to see more from Emily Yu-Xuan Qin! 

 

LGBT+ hate/discrimination (from side characters in passing), misogyny (also in passing), body horror, trypophobia/mention of, gore, violence, blood, death, self-harm (to feed familiars), animal death, mentions of First Nation history (missing and/or murdered indigenous women, very very brief and not-detailed mention of school-setting trauma), cultural appropriation (by one semi-main character of different cultures but namely First Nation), (paranormal) child loss, hospitalization, minor and not-detailed sexual content