Tender Beasts is a tour-de-force. This is a suspenseful, shiver-inducing and subtly stunning read.
Sunny is a fantastic protagonist—she is determined, driven, and feels the weight of protecting her family upon her shoulders. There are these impossible standards she feels she must live up to, put upon her by her mother and by herself. The Behre family is a cutthroat group. In fact they’re very reminiscent of what would happen if the Roys from Succession had a murder to solve and one of their own was accused. Her journey in this book is incredible character development and takes her to some really unexpected places. Liselle Sambury ensures she gets her hands dirty in a book full of grit and gore. Her character also allows for conversations around class, race, and privilege to really come into play and I loved these intersectional themes—particularly with how they impacted the murder mystery overall.
This is a book that thrives on complex personal relationships—making the tangled murder mystery at its heart that much more compelling and knotty to unravel. Every action she does will impact someone she loves, testing her allegiances to breaking point. It also raises the emotional stakes for the reader, as Sunny is someone that just feels like she needs to be loved and validated as worthy of love. Therefore, when she is placed in a consummate pressure cooker, made worse by the death and destruction around her, you cannot help but root for her.
Sambury is a force to be reckoned with and deserves to be recognised as such. Her concepts are fantastically bizarre, drawing on classic tropes but reinventing them in such fresh and exciting ways. Her books also draw deeply on navigations of tough and nuanced issues, particularly the depiction of trauma and abuse. Tender Beasts focuses on the cyclical violence borne from intergenerational trauma, with a fantastical and extremely interesting slant. It is a book that plays on the darkness within and burrows deep into the nature vs nurture debate. It also specifically focuses on this cyclical violence through the lens of communities of colour being criminalised and stereotyped as perpetrators of violence. In particular, it links ideas of masculinity and the criminalisation of young Black men in the media and society. Sambury is not playing around and it shows in every page. This book asks deep and cutting questions that play in your mind long after the final page.
I have rarely been so unnerved by a book like this one. Throughout reading, I had that sense of paranoia—created through an exquisite use of atmosphere and pacing that Sambury pulls off so well. This is such a psychologically fraught book. You are constantly questioning everything and everyone on the page. The family lineage seems to hide so many secrets, as well as the bodies piling up on the page. Everything is just suspicious and every page hums with tension. I also adored how murky Sambury gets—the ethics here are convoluted and firmly within a grey area, making you choose your loyalties just as Sunny does. It gets pretty damn dark though, so check trigger warnings before reading. The twists here are nothing short of magnificent. They are totally unexpected and flip the script every time. Sambury builds and builds to an explosive conclusion, but also one that still revels in the ambiguity of the previous events. Nothing is certain—leaving the reader in the same sense of wrongness that has followed them throughout the book.
Sambury is one of the YA horror/thriller authors for me at this moment. Tender Beasts was fantastic in every conceivable way—pacing, plotting, characterisation, atmosphere, and twists. Do yourself a favour and buy this book.
Tender Beasts is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of February 27th 2024.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
After her private school is rocked by a gruesome murder, a teen tries to find the real killer and clear her brother’s name in this psychological thriller perfect for fans of The Taking of Jake Livingston and Ace of Spades.
Sunny Behre has four siblings, but only one is a murderer.
With the death of Sunny’s mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny’s once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family’s next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious “Take care of Dom.”
The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny…and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge. Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother’s dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother’s simple request becomes a lot more complicated. Dom swears he’s innocent, and although Sunny isn’t sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder—made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another.
As Sunny and Dom work together to track down the culprit, Sunny realizes her other siblings have their own dark secrets. Soon she may have to preserve the family she’s always loved or protect the brother she barely knows—and risk losing everything her mother worked so hard to build.
