Book Review: Mahmood and the Gang of the Tiger by Jan de Leeuw

 

 

Note: This book has, at the time of publishing this review, not been translated into English (yet). The original Dutch title reads Mahmood en de Bende van de Tijger.

This looked interesting to me. Spoilers ahead.

Mahmood is a boy who grows up in a zoo, where his favorite animal is the tiger, William Blake. Then William Blake vanishes one day, presumed stolen. Mahmood tries to find out what happened to the tiger, and gets caught up in a situation with a gang which seems to have an odd fascination for tigers.

It was...a mixed bag, to be honest. I kinda had a hard time getting into it despite the interesting premise. I did like Mahmood as a character, and Arthur and Hortense made for nice side characters. And the plot setup is interesting. But the execution?  

I don't know, the book feels tonally a bit weird. Like one moment it will be a rather down-to-earth story, the next Mahmood is transferring his consciousness into other beings. There is also one character (only one) who is an anthropomorphic animal, a bear. The rest of the cast is either human or just a regular animal. There's also llamas that are literally blue. Not "blue" like how it gets used for some animals irl (e.g. Russian blue cats), where they mean gray. These llamas are actually blue like the sky. It's stuff like this that made the story a bit hard to take seriously for me and feel tonally weird, because it went so quickly from being grounded and simple into kinda weird, out-of-this world and esoteric. There isn't a very smooth transition between these two tones.

Also, the city responds really unrealistically to a tiger from a zoo going missing. If this happened in real life, people would be called to stay at home and police and animal control would be on the case in an instant. Yet here the police barely do anything, no animal control people are called, everyone just goes about their day like there's no tiger possibly roaming the streets. 

I remember a few years ago in Berlin, when a lioness was thought to have escaped and be roaming the streets. This caused a huge hysteria and a lockdown and a hunt for the animal and everything. Yet in this book there's barely any reaction to a tiger possibly having escaped a zoo in the middle of a busy city? 

I also feel that the tiger's name, William Blake, feels like a bit of a Richard Parker-ripoff. In Life of Pi, the tiger's name made sense and had an actual reason for it. Here, William's name remains unexplained. I get that giving animals "people names" can be funny, but to use the exact same naming pattern for the exact same species of animal feels uninspired. Especially if there's no reason given for the name being like that.

It's not a terrible book but it feels tonally inconsistent and the reaction to a missing tiger is very unrealistic. Some nice characters like Mahmood, Arthur and Hortense weren't enough to save it for me.

Rating: 3/5