Music for Tigers: Guest review

Today's review was written by teacher-librarian Elizabeth Cook.

Written by Michelle Kadarusman

Pajama Press

978-1-77278-054-3

192 pp.

Ages 8-12

April 2020

As an avid traveller, I love stories that help me relive fabulous trips I have taken in the past.  While I never made it all the way to Tasmania when adventuring around Australia, where Michelle Kadarusman’s Music For Tigers takes place, I felt as though I had.  Her description of the Tasmanian rainforest is breathtaking.  Michelle Kadarusman weaves her words in such a way that makes the world down under come alive.  The best way I can describe it is that she not only created a beautiful story, it felt like she created a melody with her words.  I could feel the rhythm and cadence of the eucalyptus trees and all of the animals contained on the island of Tasmania.

Music is all that the main character, Louisa, can think about when she arrives in Tasmania after a long flight from Toronto.  Clutching her violin, she would much rather be rehearsing for her upcoming audition for the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra than bushwhacking her way to a remote cabin with her Uncle Ruff that she has only just met.  At her cabin, Louisa finds solace in making her violin fill the emptiness around her with melodies to help her feel as though she were at home in Toronto.  Louisa can’t help but feel she is being watched from outside her window...and this time it isn’t the Huntsman spider that previously inhabited her cabin. 

When Louisa learns to live in the present and embrace her time in Tasmania she learns the true beauty of nature: the sound of cicadas among the gum trees, locating the Southern Cross in the dark night sky, and watching small wallabies bouncing along the forest floor.  Unfortunately, this is all under attack as Louisa learns that the camp of her great-grandmother, a safe haven for endangered animals in the wild, is soon to be bulldozed to make roads to the nearby mines.  Has Louisa learned the true value of what is important in life too late to make a difference?

Michelle Kadarusman’s Music For Tigers is a beautiful novel that is a captivating read.  It weaves in themes of animal stewardship, environmental protection, family, and friendship into one heartwarming book.  This novel would be an excellent read for adults as well as students in Grades 4 and up.  If you love protecting animals in their natural environment, you will love this book...just be sure to watch out for those bunyips!

~ Elizabeth Cook is a teacher-librarian in the Halton District School Board. She is an avid reader and fan of Canadian literature. 

Music for Tigers

Written by Michelle Kadarusman

Pajama Press

978-1-77278-054-3

192 pp.

Ages 8-12

April 2020

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. (Cicero)

There is art within the pages of Music for Tigers. It's the art that comes from seeing and hearing and knowing a place and its people. Just as she did in her earlier books, The Theory of Hummingbirds (2017) and Girl of the Southern Sea (2019), Michelle Kadarusman delivers us with her art, this time to the island of Tasmania, a land rich with stories, of history, of landscape and of life.

This vacation is getting stranger by the day. Uninvited campers. Extinct bandicoots that aren't extinct after all. Scary-looking spiders that I'm not supposed to be scared of. Odd noises and stranger smells in the night. And what exactly is the real story with the Tasmanian tigers? (pg. 44)

Louisa just wants to play violin and rehearse for a spot with the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra. Instead she is shipped off to a bush camp in the remote Tasmanian rainforest to spend six weeks of the Canadian summer with Uncle Ruff, her mother's brother. Everything is new and strange and Louisa fears the animals, the smells, and a place that offers her few comforts.

Because of the remoteness of the family camp, just an assortment of crumbling cabins beside a river, Uncle Ruff takes her to the nearby Eco Lodge for Wi-Fi. Here she meets proprietor Mel and her son, Colin. Colin, a boy whose ASD makes social interactions more challenging, is a superb bushwalking guide, knowing everything about the Tarkine, this remote area of northwest Tasmania. He tells her about the devils and the seemingly-extinct thylacine a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, which is not a tiger at all but a carnivorous marsupial that looks more dog-like with stripes on its back. He also shares stories of Tasmania's history as a convict colony, and rumours that Convict Rock, in the middle of their local river, is haunted. Coupled with readings of her great-grandmother Eleanor's journal from 1939 and 1942 and discussions with her Uncle Ruff, Louisa starts to learn what a special place the Tarkine is. Even more extraordinary is that her violin playing may be drawing a thylacine in to listen.

Michelle Kadarusman brings two worlds together in Music for Tigers and shows that they can work in unison. Louisa didn't want to leave the city for the bush, determined that she would not leave her dreams of playing the violin behind, and Uncle Ruff is happy enough to do without the amenities his sister left to enjoy in another country and in the city. Both change.

For once, I don't have my violin. I want to hear the music of the forest instead. I sit and listen to the currrawongs sing their Vivaldi chorus and the rhythmic swish and sway of the towering giants above me. I close my eyes, breathe in the lemon myrtle, and listen carefully. (pg. 168)

Together Ruff and Louisa, with a little help from their friends, work to do good, though sadly they have to do so because of the encroachment of human activities, such as mining and logging, on the natural environment. Music for Tigers is a statement, albeit a songful one, of our impact on the natural world for our own purposes, destroying critical habitats and species. It implores us to step up and put conservation and preservation measures in place before it's too late, when even the music of our efforts won't be enough to save ecosystems and their species.

With Music for Tigers, Michelle Kadarusman reminds us, again, that being human requires much of us but the dividends from benevolence to others, human and not, may be unforeseen but boundless.