Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Book Note Book Note: Tigers, Not Daughters

Mabry, Samantha. Tigers, Not Daughters. New York: Algonquin, 2020.

This is going to be a quick one because I'm not convinced this book has much to do with Shakespeare.

I found it on a list of modern novels that retell the works of Shakespeare—in the King Lear section. And the novel is about a father who is not very good at being a father and three daughters—well, four, but one dies early on and comes back as a ghost to haunt the others.

But apart from that general framework, I'm not finding much that reflects the play. Are there any readers out there who know this book and who can point me in the right direction?

Oh, there's also one direct reference to King Lear (other than the title, that is). Here it is. One of the daughters returns the school-owned copy of King Lear, saying that she doesn't need it since she is living it every day.


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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest