Tiger's Mouth

Tan brings the two friends to vivid life, showing how they define themselves in the other’s image. This is riveting.

Her prose is perceptive and often quietly funny, particularly in her observations of privilege and social performance. With its complex friendships and sharp observations, Tiger’s Mouth is a thoughtful portrait of the ways people reinvent themselves to find belonging—and the costs of doing so.

Tan ( What We Were Promised) writes lucidly, with fluid ease, guiding her characters through isolation, ambition, gratitude, righteousness. She reveals the self-absorption that eclipses all else, and the desperation that separates, and the knowledge that reunites through her sweeping, cinematic storytelling.

Tan explores the complexities of relationships, especially familial ties, and the impact that differences in wealth and privilege can have on friendships. Her balanced development of both Jacks is engaging and thoughtful. She excels at presenting their unique perspectives evenly as they grow together and then apart, and years later as they navigate the company’s ethical choices related to launching their joint project during the pandemic.

At the heart of the novel is the shifting friendship between the two men. Its exploration is subtle and enhanced by the many passages of gripping dialogue that reveal the ways in which hierarchies shape relationships. The novel's climax coincides with the pandemic—its boredom and fear nicely captured as circumstances bring the friends in contact, and then in ultimate conflict, with each other. A thoughtful and gratifying novel, suggesting class may be the most meaningful barrier to friendship.

Tiger’s Mouth is a remarkable achievement: a novel whose deep attention to character is equaled by its propulsive plotting and incisive social commentary. Lucy Tan pairs a Sally Rooney–like eye for psychological nuance with a thoughtful exploration of 2020s America, from racial inequity to the paradoxes of healthcare and technology. The result is a wise, clear-eyed, and compassionate work of art.

Tiger’s Mouth is the rare page-turner that is also compassionate, wise, and finely observed. Through a cast of characters who come to feel as familiar as family, Lucy Tan asks questions about the costs of power and privilege, friendship across class, and seemingly unalterable societal strictures. This is a novel—assured, propulsive, insightful—about what we inherit and what we create for ourselves, and the relationships that might transcend it all.

A stunning story of friendship and family, love and belonging, Tiger’s Mouth takes a bruising and bittersweet look at identity and our changing perception of success and failure. I absolutely adored it.

Tiger’s Mouth vividly captures the tumultuous beauty of growing up and growing into oneself, as ‘the Jacks’ tangle with each other, with the past, with a changing world, and with the peril of truly being seen. I loved this dazzling, incisive, and tender story of friendship.

This is a thrilling story about ambition and friendship that left me breathless. Chen and Owens are at once familiar and unlike any characters I’ve ever met, their decades-long dance between artifact and vulnerability slowly revealing the very nature of intimacy itself. Tiger’s Mouth dazzled me.