Point of View

When You Trap a Tiger is written in the first-person point of view, as well as in the present tense. The protagonist, Lily Reeves, is also the novel’s narrator and thus the book is situated in the worldview and understanding of a pre-teen Korean American girl. Lily describes the events of this novel as they ‘happen’ to her, lending the book a sense of immediacy and mystery at the same time: the reader knows only as much as Lily does in the moment, but no more and with no sense of foresight or foreboding. Had the book been written in the past tense, for example, Halmoni’s death at the end of the novel would have felt like an inevitability, the tense changing the rapid development of her illness into an event once experienced and recounted rather than one causing immediate grief and panic...