Hot off the Shelf: What I'm reading - 'Tiger Milk' by Stefanie De Velasco

*No spoilers, but discusses subject matter*

Long time no blog. Long story short I've been up to my eyeballs in other stuff but I really miss blogging so I'm gonna make more of an effort to get one post done each week. We'll see later how that goes. I'll apologise now for the grammar and way this is written. I think it's because I'm trying so hard to formalise my essays and stuff everything else I write come out like word-vom right now.

For now, the most pressing thing I want to talk about is what I've been reading outside of uni. There's been some very *ahem* enlightening books I've read recently about systems management and censorship and other joy-bringing topics, but let's stick to the fun stuff. Not only have I recently finished The Sandman graphic novels by the beautiful Neil Gaiman (might do another post about that. Not sure how I can sum up my thoughts on it without my head exploding with awe though), but I picked up, by chance, a book called Tiger Milk from my library the other week whilst collecting some other reservations. Tiger Milk is the literary debut from author Stephanie De Velasco. It was only released this month (at least the English translation anyway) and this is the cover:

(Image from Waterstones.com)

 

It was the cover that made me pick it up, I love it. For some reason, upon initial glance, I thought it might be about India (being where most Tigers live...I think) but nope, Tiger Milk is set in the grittier edges of Germany. It's written from the perspective of German teen Nini, and we follow her, her best fried Jameelah, and her other friends over one summer. For those wildly offended by such things I'll mention now this book contains smoking, swearing, under-aged sex and drinking, attempted suicide and murder. But it's not you're typical bad-girl book. At least I didn't think so. I think it was very real and those commenting on Goodreads saying that the girls were too young to be doing this that and the other, clearly were never a teen in the last twenty years. Characters were brought across to the reader effortlessly, I felt by the end I knew even some of the minor characters quite well. Even the stranger characters like Aslagon and Apollo, who early on in the book, demand nail clippings from Nini and Jameelah so they can "build the ship and bring on the apocalypse." I've only been to Germany a couple of times and knew none of the places in this books, but again, throughout the book Velasco paints a really clear picture of each setting so you feel you know what she's talking about (or you can imagine you do anyway). The dialogue flicks between blunt, reported style speech (hardly any of the book has any more punctuation than full stops and question marks) and lengthy, dream like passages - almost fairy tale-esque, like when Jameelah talks about the mythical, see-through beast she saw in her dreams that was a cross between a kangaroo and a dragon but lived in the water and purred like a cat. Or the purple spiral staircase Nini sees when she sleeps with people. I loved this mix of the real and the weird. It felt like being permanently drunk, or in and out of sleep whilst reading it.

Because it was written in the way someone would talk to you, and the girls were really interesting characters, I finished this in about two days. I just kept picking it up. I haven't had that in a long time so it was refreshing. I was shocked in parts, I reminisced at others, but the ending was brutal and sad and really brought to light the harsh reality underlying the whole book, even the more light-hearted parts. Most of all Tiger Milk made me want to be a teen again.

FYI: Tiger Milk is a drink; a mix of milk, Mariacron Brandy and Maracuja Juice. From the book:
"Pour a little of the school cafeteria milk, a lot of the maracuja juice and a decent slug of brandy into the Muller jar." You gotta stir it with your finger. The original German text was released in 2013 and called TigerMilch, if you want to read it in German. Buy it from Waterstones, and see what others have to say on Goodreads. Or just stumble across it in the library like I did.

Over and out.