#brad riew

[honeyxmonkey]

Well if theres no fanart of this fucking book, I guess I'll just make it myself–

[the-book-ferret]

Inspired by true stories from the authors’ grandparents’ lives during one of the darkest periods in Korean history, The Last Tiger is a debut young adult fantasy novel about the power of love to give voice to a silenced people.

[book-challenger]

Travel Destination: South Korea II

The Hole by Hye-young Pyun

Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house.

But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

Small Gods of Calamity by Sam Kyung Yoo

A parasitic, soul-eating spirit worm has gone into a feeding frenzy, but all the Jong-ro Police Department's violent crimes unit sees is a string of suicides.

Except for Kim Han-gil, Seoul's only spirit detective. He's seen this before. He'll do anything to stop another tragedy from happening, even if that means teaming up with Shin Yoonhae, the man Han-gil believes is responsible for the horrifying aftermath of his mother's last exorcism.

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer.

Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.

Dreamslinger by Graci Kim

14 year old Aria Loveridge lives at the Resthaven Home for Dreamslingers, a safe haven for children born with a genetic mutation that transports them to a powerfully magical realm while they sleep. But this magic can be unpredictable even deadly. After all, it was only ten years ago when members of the Royal League of Dreamslingers caused the Great Outburst, a tragedy that killed hundreds of people, including Aria’s mom.

So when the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk—home of the Dreamslinger League—announces the first Dreamslinger trials where teenage slingers from around the world are invited to compete for a chance to join the League and learn how to use their powers, Aria knows what she must do: join the trials and take down the League from the inside.

The Last Tiger by Brad Riew and Julia Riew

In a colonized land where tigers are being hunted to extinction and ancient magic stirs, two star-crossed teens—Lee Seung, a servant yearning for freedom, and Choi Eunji, a noble girl defying tradition—join forces to try and reshape their respective fates.

But their relationship evolves from begrudging accomplices to bitter adversaries as they soon find themselves on opposite sides of a battle over the last tiger, a symbol of their people’s lost freedom and key to the liberation of their country. As the ties between Seung and Eunji are complicated by their conflicting loyalties, tensions rise—especially when a charming princeling of the empire begins to rival for Eunji’s affection.

[bookaddict24-7]

(New Young Adult Releases Coming Out Today! (July 29th, 2025)

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Have I missed any new Young Adult releases? Have you added any of these books to your TBR? Let me know!

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New Releases:

A Mastery of Monsters by Liselle Sambury

Soulmatch by Rebecca Danzenbaker

Soul of Shadow by Emma Noyes

Donut Summer by Anita Kelly

We Won't All Survive by Kate Alice Marshall

Very Dangerous Things by Lauren Muñoz

Immortal Consequences by I.V. Marie

Dead Girls Don't Talk by Sandra J. Paul

The Last Tiger by Julia Riew & Brad Riew

Star Wars: The Acolyte by Tessa Gratton

New Sequels:

Bones at the Crossroads (Blood at the Root #2) by LaDarrion Williams

A Raging Heart (A Ruinous Fate #3) by Kaylie Smith

Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game #2) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2) by Ava Reid

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Happy reading!

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Last Tiger

By Julia Riew and Brad Riew.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Last Tiger | Author: Julia Riew / Brad Riew | Publisher: Kokila (2025)

[niamhs-reading-adventures]

Bookish Advent Calendar - 17th December

The Last Tiger by Julia Riew and Brad Riew

[hi-there-cat]

🌟The Last Tiger by Julia & Brad Riew - 4 / 5 stars🌟

This book has: Korean mythology inspired fantasy, Love story based on the authors' grandparents' lives, Friends-to-enemies-to-lovers, setting inspired by Korea under Japanese colonial rule

So many times, while reading this, I thought «wow, these colonisers are like comically evil, that seems way over the top» and then one second later I remembered what I learned about the Japanese occupation of Korea and China and realised that no, that actually happened. This book is simultaneously heartwarming and horrifying. 

The story is based on the authors’ grandparents’ actual love story (with some liberties taken given that it is a (YA) fantasy) set against the backdrop of Japanese-occupied Korea during the second world war. As a YA book, some of the more gruesome crimes perpetrated by the Japanese are necessarily omitted, but it nonetheless does a great job of showcasing the arbitrary cruelty that colonisation brings with it. The story is well-paced and interesting, though it never quite managed to hook me completely. 

I was very glad that the book did not end with the magic instantly solving Japanese colonialism and all its problems. Since that is a common way that YA fantasy books conclude, I was kind of expecting (and dreading) that this story would follow that trajectory, which would have cheapened the otherwise well written portrayal of life under and resistance against colonialism.

Really, the main thing that irked me was the fact that book’s stand-ins for Korea, Japan and China were ‘the Tiger people’, ‘the Dragon people’ and ‘the Serpent people’. I understand not wanting to use the real-life names of these countries and ethnicities, but the chosen substitutes often ended up feeling awkward when used in sentences. The fact that the nation/ethnicity names were essentially the only thing that was substituted with fantasy versions didn’t help much. The names of Korean and Japanese characters were just real-life Korean and Japanese names (e.g. Yamamoto, Kobayashi) and the foods where real-life dishes from the two cultures (e.g. kimchi, miso, matcha).

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Thank you to Penguin Young Readers for the ARC