Book Review: Tender Beasts by Liselle Sambury

Sunny Behre might be the fourth child in her family of five siblings, but she knows she’s long been groomed to succeed her mother as leader of their wealthy, influential Black family. Her mother, Ainsley, was a force of nature, parlaying the inheritance of a ranch into various successful business ventures that catapulted their family into the Toronto elite. Perhaps nothing is more meaningful to the Behres, however, than the private school they founded for underprivileged kids. All the Behre children have attended as proof of the school’s excellent credentials and continue to take an interest in it even after graduation, with their father Jay serving as principal.

After Ainsley’s unexpected death, seventeen-year-old Sunny is poised to take over, so she is shocked when her eldest sister, Karter, assumes the role instead. She’s even more displeased when the only instruction her mother’s will gives her is, “Take care of Dom.” Dom is the youngest child and has always been something of an outcast in their family, even before he was accused of murdering his white girlfriend. The Behres have absolutely closed ranks around him in public. In private, though, none of them are sure of his innocence. His best friend, Jeremy, has no such doubts, telling Sunny:

“It’s bullshit, man. You know, when me and Dom hang out, it’s like someone is always looking for a reason to call the law on us. We’re leaning against a lamppost–loitering. We’re browsing the shelves–finna take something. We’re laughing too loud–disturbing the peace. They’re always paying so much attention to us.[”]

 

I didn’t know what to say to him. Nothing he’d said was wrong. Justice wasn’t supposed to discriminate, but of course it did. And we [Behres] were exploiting it, too. Using every bit of money and influence to get Dom whatever we could in a way that Black people without the money couldn’t.

Determined to grin and bear it till the family can see that she’s their rightful leader, Sunny throws herself into making a success of her school life and keeping Dom out of trouble. Her purpose doesn’t even waver when she walks into the academy’s cafeteria one afternoon and finds a bloodied Dom standing over the corpse of a fellow student. Her unrelenting commitment to her family and to her mother’s directive causes her to instinctively cover up the crime, even as she starts to realize that there is something very wrong going on with the people she loves the most.

Because–despite her family conditioning her to instinctively scapegoat Dom for any bad thing that happens–Sunny does genuinely believe that Dom is innocent of at least this last murder. But someone else is definitely guilty as the bodies begin to pile up and the evidence points to one of the Behre children being an accomplished serial killer. Will Sunny be able to sort through years of family secrets to get to the truth of who’s truly behind this string of murders?

No one in any genre writes about hidden family trauma as well as Liselle Sambury does. Between this and her prior novel, Delicious Monsters, her ability to dissect family expectations in the face of overwhelming horror and, perhaps more crucially, how to work towards the healthiest resolution for everyone concerned is unparalleled. Sunny’s plight as a habitual people pleaser is especially resonant, given that her determination to be the constantly upbeat cheerleader of the family stems from her survival of a terrible ordeal as a five-year-old:

Everyone thought I would fall apart. I’d wanted to. I had a bit, honestly. But then I saw my parents fight. Saw my siblings who were supposed to be watching me wracked with guilt, compounded by our parents blaming them too[.] And I knew if everyone saw I was okay, it would stop. So I’d put a smile on my face and acted like everything was fine.

 

It worked. The fighting stopped. I still had nightmares until I was twelve, but as long as I pretended like everything was fine, I could keep the peace in my family. I had helped them with nothing more than a smile.

 

Mom said that was the moment she realized that I was resilient. I had the motivation to prioritize the family over myself. That was what was needed to lead.

Between the keen psychological insights into both dysfunctional family dynamics and the political systems that victimize minorities and the poor, this would already be a terrific book. But Ms. Sambury takes it one step further, composing a truly absorbing murder mystery novel with original folk horror highlights. Sunny and her family are all complex, engaging characters, and the tangled history that demands its reckoning of them is both unique in its details while staying strongly rooted in the kind of family issues that far too many people like to pretend don’t exist.