The Tiger's Apprentice

Author: Laurence Yep
Published: April 2003 (Harper Collins)
Category: YA Fantasy
Rating: 5/10

Tom Lee is an orphan living with his grandmother in San Francisco. He's the odd kid out, as his grandmother is supposedly a witch and kids pick on Tom and make fun of her. Tom, as a precocious preteen, takes each insult to heart and gets into lots of fights.

Tom's grandmother, Mrs. Lee is actually a witch, one of the Guardians who take care of a phoenix egg. If the phoenix hatches, the person controlling it could use the phoenix to control the world. When Tom gets home one day, one of his grandmother's former Guardian students is visiting. It's Mr. Hu, and he's actually a tiger. In a Men in Black moment, Mr. Hu explains that lots of creatures like him are living amongst humans, particularly in San Francisco!

While having tea, the house is attacked and Mrs. Lee sacrifices herself to give Tom and Mr. Hu time to escape with the phoenix egg. Tom becomes a petulant kid (like Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix) and says he doesn't want to become a Guardian and would rather live in an orphanage than stay with a MAGICAL TALKING TIGER WHO CAN KICK ASS.

Mr. Hu calls upon some friends to help protect the phoenix egg, one being Monkey from Chinese mythology and Yep's Dragons of the Lost Sea series. They also recruit a dragon from Goblin Square, a magical place hidden in San Fran, very much like Diagon Alley. It was a bit of a ripoff of Diagon Alley, what with the bricks disappearing to provide an entry to the square.

Then the phoenix egg is lost because of Tom's stupidity and they have to retrieve it. There's a lot of arguing and I felt that the story suffered because there was no good balance between narrative and dialogue. It was either all one or the other, without enough blending of the two. The book was really short too, but I can't judge the book based on that, as it is a YA title. It was kind of eh to me. Tom annoyed me too much and not enough happened to make me want to continue reading the story.