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May, the 12-year-old protagonist of Galaxy Craze’s 1999 debut, By the Shore, continues to come of age in Tiger, Tiger, but it would be a mistake to categorize this new work as a sequel. While the earlier volume plunked May, her brother Eden and hippie mom Lucy at an English seaside lodge with a revolving door of men, this second volume focuses on a darker episode, after Lucy walks out on her self-absorbed husband and takes the kids stateside. There, they settle into California and the creepy New Age solace of an ashram.

The basic story here – kids in the care of childlike adults – has been told before, most obviously in Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky. But Craze writes the sort of direct, dry-eyed prose that elevates even the most mundane events into carefully observed drama. Chapters pass without much happening of real significance, but this is still a page-turner; the thrills come from the deceptively simple descriptions of daily life at the ashram. May and Eden can see through the cult in ways their mother cannot, and spin the bottle and other adolescent rites of passage are cast against the even more ridiculous charades of the spellbound adults.

Craze doesn’t quite manage to penetrate to her protagonist’s emotions, leaving Tiger, Tiger a little toothless by the end. But trouble still lurks. As their mother becomes more enraptured with Parvati, the group’s leader, the kids are left essentially on their own among the other offspring at the encampment. When Lucy earns the trusted position of caring for Parvati’s own child, her parental instinct kicks in and brings home an unexpected point: A patchwork family is better than none at all. Ken Foster

From Time Out New York