Tender Morsels (edition 2009)

From my blog:

I can’t believe I actually liked Tender Morsels; 75 pages in, I was convinced that I would hate it. However, it turned out to be quite a good book, although it is uncomfortable to read. (side note: I actually have an autographed hardcover of this book, having chanced upon a remnant of a recent signing in Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL.)

Tender Morsels is generally advertised as a retelling of the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale, and it does live up to that. It follows a mother and her two daughters, one quiet and one impetuous, and they do encounter a bear. I think that the fairy tale retelling almost does the book a disservice, since the phrase “fairy tale retelling” raises so many different expectations for the reader. I didn’t see how the evocation of the Snow White and Rose Red story was important to the book, but that’s probably something I’m missing, rather than a fault of the book.

The protagonists of the story are Liga, and her two daughters Branza and Urdda. Liga’s first fifteen years of life are quite horrible, she’s is subjected to constant rape, forced abortions and infanticide from her father, all while being totally sheltered from the outside world. After his death, she is left pregnant and becomes an outcast in her town, and is also treated poorly. (This forms the first 75 pages of the book, and is the reason I thought I’d hate the book.) However, her luck finally changes, and she is transported to a safe version of her world, where she raises her daughters in peace. The rest of the book tells of her journey back to the world where she’s from and how she learns to cope with events from her life and trust people again. Her daughters’ stories and fates are also explored.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Liga’s story is ultimately sad and heartbreaking, and I wish the book hadn’t ended the way it had, with Liga’s disappointment. I understand that that was a consequence of Liga having spent twenty five years in her safe world, rather than learning to live with the truth about humanity, however unintended that was. It keeps with the somber tone of the issues the book addresses, but It doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking. I was glad that Branza and Urdda were able to get a good ending, though.

I was also made uncomfortable by the controversial “rape as vengeance” scene, but that seemed to be the intent. It also fits in with the tone of the book, though, and I understand why it was there.

SPOILERS END

Overall, an uncomfortable but thought-provoking book, and one I’m glad I read. ( )

I rarely if ever choose to not finish a book, but I made an exception for this one. After the first few pages, I told my husband I did not like the book. I needed to read it though because it is a Young Adult novel and I am a YA librarian.After 160 pages of forcing myself to read and it just did not get any better, I quit! I think there were three different worlds intersecting, but I am not completely sure. I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, so the different worlds was not an issue. They just didn't make sense in this book.I originally picked up the book based on a recommendation from a blog I follow. I wish I could remember which one, so I would know to hesitate before taking another of their recommendations.I rarely react this negatively to a book. At least I can give it the compliment of saying it elicited a strong reaction. ( )

I almost didn't make it through the beginning of this book. It was tough. Really tough. The first 50 or so pages deal with incest, forced abortion, gang rape, infanticide, and suicide. Hefty, icky stuff. I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if the payoff would be worth it. I'm glad I stuck it out, though, because the rest of the book was almost free of these issues and a pretty wonderful story. And yes, it really did need that setup, so I don't even mind the beginning much. Liga is an amazing character. Even as she's shaped by her history of sexual abuse she isn't consumed by it for the entire book, and I like how she grows and changes without loosing sight of who she used to be. It's also pretty great how she always retains a childlike quality that reminds you how sheltered and abused she was as a child and yet she always strives to rise above and do the right thing. Branza and Urdda are well constructed too. They are unique without being shaped by their conception, which is a hard thing to do when dealing with such heavy material. I like how they each have predictable, unique reactions to the events around them. I also really liked the overall moral of the story: no matter how hard your life is you have to grow up and live it sometime or things will be harder for you later. A good lesson for us all to learn.

I am quite conflicted after reading this book. On the one hand, it was certainly well-written and thought provoking. On the other hand, the content was of such a disturbing nature that I was constantly shocked by what I read. Perhaps this does make it, if not a good book, certainly an interesting one.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I picked up this book. I was wandering around an airport during a 10 hour layover, utterly bored. I saw the book and it looked entertaining. The back-cover blurb described it as a beautiful re-telling of the Grimm brothers tale of Snow White and Red Rose. I was intrigued.

The book pulls you in quite quickly. Before 50 pages had passed though, I noticed something rather peculiar. I flip back a few pages, and yes....that was an abortion she just described. Wait....was she just talking about incest?!?! 100 pages in you have a brutally described gang-bang. Later, bestiality and frank talk about violent sexuality, death, and unusual relationships.

When you step back however, these are all themes prevalent in the original fairytales, before Disney got a hold of them. What makes the content of the book more disturbing though is the way in which Ms. Lanagan writes. If she had written the novel in a less poetic and picturesque manner, you might have been able to write the book off as a violent and pornographic novel which has no place in literature. But she writes so beautifully and subtly that the book takes on this amazing quality that you cannot dismiss.

The novel is clearly not intended for audiences that can't handle the subject manner, and do know what you're going to read before hand. However, there was something rather fascinating about the book. The characters are so nuanced, and you heart will literally break for Liga (the main character) as she endures violent tragedy after violent tragedy before struggling to raise her two daughters. Her struggle after they are grown with trusting men - understandable given her history - reads so realistic that you cannot help but shed a few tears.

I have never read a book quite like this before, and it is likely I never will again. I do suggest you give this book a try though, haven taken into account my aforementioned warnings regarding the content. ( )

I started reading this book and was instantly turned off by the rape and incest in the opening chapters. I kept reading though and the story just got stranger and stranger. There are different worlds that have different speeds of time, humans become bears and there was an uncomfortable sexual tension between the human/bears and the women in the story. I wouldn't want my 14 year old daughter to read this book, I feel that it should be classified as an adult book. I'm not a prude, but this book goes a little too far, in my opinion.
Even though this book had several "ewww" moments, it was a good story and well written. It read like and old school fairy tale. I have a feeling that this book will pop into my head for many moths to come. ( )

Teenaged Liga, with a baby by her father and pregnant again by gang rape, can't take any more pain. Magically transported away from her miserable life into a sort of paradise, she raises her daughters in peace and tries to heal.

Over the years, her haven becomes a rut. Her world is safe, but it isn't the real world--and the barrier between the worlds is more permeable than Liga thinks. Liga must find the strength to put heaven behind her and forge an authentic adult life.

Beautiful retelling of "Snow White and Rose Red" that deals with challenging themes. Liga is strong but flawed: strong enough to survive her hellish early life, flawed enough to pull the blankets up over her head and delay re-entry into the real world. The book has attracted some criticism for a passage, late in the book, that deals out retaliatory rape against Liga's rapists. It is a disturbing passage, certainly, but that's its power: the readers (as well as Liga herself) know by then that, while it certainly harms those men, it doesn't, for all that, accomplish anything good. There is a cruel sort of justice to it, but doesn't erase Liga's assault. She has, by then, grown into a true woman, capable of living an adult life in the real world: stepping forward into the sunlight to say she does have a right to it, does have worth. ( )

I was initially only able to read this book in short bursts. The starting subject matter--incest and consequent abortion(s) forced by the paternal perpetrator--was brutal. That brutality coupled with very slow, almost dreamy pacing and (albeit very intentional) archaic phrasing made for difficult, disjointed reading at first.

Liga's first daughter, Branza, is borne of incest. Her second daughter, Urdda, is borne of gang rape. Despite the brutality of their origins, Liga loves both of her very different daughters a great deal. She loves them so much, in fact, her wishes that they never know such pain as she has triggers a kind of cocooning around them; that cocoon is Liga's personal idea of heaven. Her girls thus grow up in this heaven, which is a safe, less complex version of their own world. It's largely free from suffering but just as largely free from meaning and meaningful interaction.

Branza is by and large content to take the world for what it is, but Urdda struggles against it until she finds a way through to the real world. The aftermath of Urdda's decision is what ultimately makes the book a compelling, breathtaking read.

Life outside of Liga's heaven is infinitely more complex. In short, it's life. It's as full of people who might hurt you as help you learn to sew complicated dresses. She's absolutely enthralled by it and wouldn't dream of returning to heaven. Urdda's sister and mother feel rather differently about the matter, for equally understandable reasons. The book is at its most compelling as it explores the womens' different feelings and rationales.

In the end, the protagonists do find their happy endings. Whether an individual reader will see each ending as happy depends on their experiences, I suppose, but I wept with joy as I read the concluding paragraph. The beauty of this book, as with life, is that the magic is in the small moments. Sometimes, a happy ending won't involve a wealthy prince or any prince at all. Sometimes, it will instead be the simple, overwhelming joy of finding satisfaction in knowing that what and WHO you have--bruises, scars, bad memories as well as the good--is so much better and truer than the possible emptiness of a generic happy ending. ( )

Very interesting read. I quite like it! Mostly done with it. Will update when I finish the book :) ( )

This is an odd book, and a difficult one, but also a powerful one.

People call it a fairy tale, but other than the quaint fantasyish sort of setting, it doesn't bear much of what I'd call the 'fairy tale feel'. The story is shocking and controversial - a woman gives birth to two girls, one the product of incest and rape, the other the result of a brutal gang rape. Afterwards, some benevolent force in the world carries her away to a place where everyone is kind and friendly and all unsavory aspects of the world have been scrubbed away. The lines between that place and the real world start to thin, though, and eventually Liga and her daughters, Branza and Urdda, must fast it.

I spent a lot of time defending this book to a friend of mine while reading it (she hated the premise, hated the characters, hated the 'passivity'), which made me think hard about what works here and what doesn't. To be honest, I didn't enjoy reading it that much. The writing style wasn't to my taste, and for much of the book very little actually /happens/. And it's not a short book.

What works for me, though, is the book as an exploration of responses to abuse. Liga spends her entire life hiding from what happened to her by literally creating a world around her that she can control down to the finest detail. She accepts some aspects of her abuse - her two daughters - but scrubs away every unpleasant person, every threat, every dangerous emotion. She survives by locking herself away from anything that could break down her walls, and as the story progresses it becomes clear that even her relationship with her daughters is affected by her need to cling to this control.

It's heartbreaking, when taken as a whole. There are no happy endings here. My heart broke at the end. The few times that Liga reaches for healing or forward movement, she fails miserably. It's hard not to take as the lesson that there are some things some people simply never recover from.

But there are, at least, her daughters. Both struggle with anger and hurt and betrayal, and there is both fear and a thirst for vengeance. But both also step into the real world in the end and find something worth holding onto.

I'm not sure what it all means, in the end. And I'm not sure I liked it that much. But it /is/ interesting. And it is, in places, very powerful. ( )

Written in the style of a fairy tale (Snow White and Rose Red), and having some features of a fantasy story, this book manages to incorporate many of the worst story lines possible to throw into a YA book - rape by father, gang rape, bestiality, and gang rape of men by men.

That some of these events took place in the fantasy world of the rape victim doesn't lessen the impact of the scenes. When Liga and her two daughters move into the real world, part two of some of the horrors are relived as one of the daughters demands to know about her father (she was the product of the gang rape). The other daughter was blissfully uninterested in knowing who her father was.

Touched upon was the conflicting emotions of empathy for the victim and guilt about not acting on the knowledge to protect her. When Liga's father is killed, members of the village swoop in to help her prepare his body for burial, no one comments on the fact that she is very pregnant, It doesn't dawn on anyone that she only came in contact with one man. Even the woman (!) that provides the father with concoctions to abort babies (three times!) prefers the payment she gets to saving the girl from the abuse.

Without a doubt, the language is amazing and the mother/daughter scenes are touching. But I have a hard time accepting the amount of horror inflicted on this poor girl in the name of a story. The real fantasy in this story is the serenity displayed by the mother after all that has happened to her.

I looked up the reviews from literary magazines for this book and they were raves, without exception. I wonder, sometimes, if critics are too far removed from their audiences to the detriment of that audience. Being a mother, and working in a high school library, I can't think of any type of teen that I could recommend this to. ( )

Tender Morsels is a retelling of Snow-White and Rose-Red by Margo Lanagan.

Plot:
After her mother’s death, Liga lives alone with her father in the middle of the woods – and has to be a stand-in for her mother in every way. Before her father can force the third abortion on her, he suffers a fatal accident though, and Liga can keep her daughter Branza. But the crappiness is far from being over. Not soon after Branza is born, five young men from the town come to Liga’s hut and rape her. When Liga tries to kill herself and Branza after this, a magical force saves her and transports her to a magical world, where everything is made to fit Liga and her two daughters (one of them still unborn) perfectly. But the real world can not be hold completely at bay.

I enjoyed Tender Morsels. It’s well-written, a very interesting spin on the fairy tale and the characters are very vivid. It does have some problems with the pacing, though and I did not like the ending.

Read more at my blog: http://kalafudra.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/tender-morsels-margo-lanagan/ ( )

Terrifying and amazing. Published as adult fiction in the author's home country, as young adult fiction in mine, and having fair warning about the story's graphic scenes I tried to keep my expectations pretty broad. Drawn from "The Ungrateful Dwarf" (the source material for the Grimm Brother's fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red"), Lanagan explores pain and beauty, the misuse of magic, and living in a man's, man's world.

There were some places where I felt it dragged and I just wanted to hurry and get back to the characters that I liked better. Even still, the unique language and lyrical prose kept me enthralled, and I understood why those scenes were there overall.

Not an easy read, but an extremely worthwhile one. Before I was finished with it, I ordered a copy of the audiobook because I plan on spending time with this gem again. ( )

I made the strategic mistake of finishing up the last 80 pages or so this morning before work, I found myself with some extra time so I thought I'd settle in on the couch before racing off to get my train. Half a box of Kleenex later ... I should have called in. Slobbering, snotty mess with puffy eyes, I wasn't really suited for the office.

How to sum up what this book is about? I guess it's about coming to terms with having to give up a fabricated safe haven in exchange for the weight of reality, with all the heartbreak that entails. And realizing that you don't necessarily achieve your heart's desire, often for no particular reason at all. Plot-wise, a young woman living on the fringe of society in a small village finds a blissful home for herself and her two young daughters, interrupted only occasionally by travelers from a cruder and harsher world, including men who have been temporarily turned into bears.

The writing was fabulous, but I think I have some issues with what I believe is the book's position that good men are the exception. I am willing to be argued out of this, though.

Grade: A
Recommended: To fans of dark and contemplative fantasy. I would mention that the opening and the closing of the story involve abusive situations, and retribution for abuse, that, while not graphic exactly, are harrowing. ( )

Tender Morsels is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm story “Snow White and Rose Red” but with a feminist twist. There isn’t much longing by women for rescue by a man in this book, and in fact princely males are few and far between. But more than that, for the most part the women are self-sufficient, and while some women do long for physical affirmation, one guesses that if they explored lesbianism they would be just fine. However, the author is toppling enough fairy castles as it is, and no Happily Ever After takes place on the Isle of Lesbos.

Since the story does follow the Grimm tale so closely, I would recommend that would-be readers of this book begin with a short version of the fairy tale you can read online. There is much in the story that seems inexplicable otherwise, and furthermore it will add to the appreciation of how the author has changed the story.

Lanagan’s story starts out more violently than the fairy tale, no doubt to justify the feminist turn. (The U.K.'s Guardian calls it "a dark and shocking reworking of the Snow White and Rose Red fairytale" before noting that it won the World Fantasy Award for best novel.) The mother of the two girls is not a widow in Tender Morsels. Rather, Liga Longfield, a fourteen-year-old girl, lives alone with her father who rapes and beats her repeatedly. He is the father of her first daughter Branza.

Mercifully, the father is killed (or indeed, he would have had Liga abort the baby, as she had to do with two others, thanks to his having paid Annie, a local witch, for abortive powders). But Liga’s life does not improve as she had thought it would. Boys in the village, seeing that she is unmarried but with a child, take her to be “a slut,” and gang-rape her, also abusing her much in the process.

In despair and fear of further attacks, Liga tries to kill herself and Branza (not yet knowing she is pregnant from the gang rape). But a glowing magical being takes her away instead to a parallel world that is Liga’s version of heaven. The boys who raped her are not there; in fact, all of the men are barely present at all, and the women are friendly, accepting, and generous. And Liga’s second child, Urdda, is born.

Branza (“Snow White”) and Urdda (“Rose Red”) have very different personalities and dispositions, but they also both seem like pretty normal girls. Liga stays fairly zoned out in her “heaven,” content that she does not have to obsess over protecting herself and her children. The three of them go about their lovely, quiet existence, until incursions from the real world start to occur. One is by an irascible dwarf, who comes and goes and is finally eliminated by a bear, another creature who has started to appear in Liga’s world.

The first bear they see is actually Davit Ramstrong, a caring and gentle young man from parallel reality who befriends the little family in his guise as a bear. He goes back to his world and a second bear, another boy from Liga’s original town - Teasel Wurledge – arrives, who is not so innocuous. But although he eats the dwarf, he does not hurt any of the women. (Before being consumed, the dwarf tried to convince the bear to eat the young girls instead of him, claiming they were "tender morsels" the bear would like better.) He does try to have sex with Branza, but she rebuffs him and then he too, leaves.

Urdda, now age 14, loved having the companionship of the bears, and longs to see what else is in this magical other place. She manages to follow Teasel back to his world, and she begins to live among them. She gets a job as witch Annie’s assistant. It is frightening at first in the real world: she can’t figure out why everything was so similar, and yet so different:

"And when [what she saw] had exhausted her by not assembling into any kind of sense, she raised her gaze to the familiar stars, and to the cheese-round moon, rough-faced and impersonal, coasting along the cloud-streaks above the black trees.”

Eventually she understood that the other world, where she was born, was her mother’s heaven:

"It is the world as my mother would have wanted it, for us all to be safe in, her and Branza and me…It is quite like here, only simpler, with all the cruel people taken out, all the rudeness and suddenness, and much of the noise and bustle.”

There was no alcohol or currency or poverty either, in this more perfect world.

Urdda explains this to the sorceress, Miss Dance, who originally trained Annie, and who complies with Urdda’s request to bring her mother and Branza out from Liga’s heaven also, to be with her. Miss Dance agrees; she is critical of Liga for her overprotectiveness, charging that the girls have not been able to learn how to cope with and overcome adversity, but I am not inclined to agree. Why would Liga have thought they couldn’t always stay in her heaven?

Liga is very afraid at first to be back in reality, but even Liga had grown restless with perfection. She found she wanted to be “seen and known and some way understood” by a man who didn’t want to hurt her, but perhaps was kind and loving like the first bear had been.

All of them have to learn to deal with the real world and all its aleatory cruelty, as well as its occasional bliss. But they have had no practice, so it will not come easily.

Discussion: Generally I don’t read fairy tales. One reason is certainly that their message is so patriarchal. But Lanagan eliminates that problem.

Another reason I tend to eschew fairy tales, however, is that they are loaded with symbols and subliminal meanings that I don’t always understand. And yet I got caught up in the poignant story of these three women; it is a story that pokes up through the fantastical elements like the first crocuses in spring.

But some of the symbolism seems so central, it can’t be ignored. The bears get the most attention in this retelling. In general, bears can be said to represent nature, coexistence with nature, desires, drives, and the latent beast in all living things.

In this story, the bears and their cares play a large role. The first male bear responds to the openness and trust of the family of women, and tries to be nurturing in return, although it is clear to him and others that he is just holding his bestiality at bay. The second bear makes much less of an attempt to domesticate his bestial urges, and apparently has a very large male member he can put to use when his size and strength have gotten him the female of his choice. Female bears thus caught have little recourse to intercourse, but when Branza is faced with the potential of rape, somehow she has the wherewithal to escape. This excellent outcome suggests Branza did learn something from living in “heaven” after all.

There is some lovely writing in this book. To give just one example of many:

"The last blue of evening, close around us, shielded us from eyes, and yet some stars winked there and were festive also and who could mind their watching? And moths flew soft and silver. The stars silvered them, I guessed… they were low like a mist, the moths, like a dancing mist, large and small like snow wafting on a breeze, as if the very air were so alive that it had burst into these creatures, taken wing and fluttered in all these different directions.”

The ending is interesting because it is not ambiguous, but still can be interpreted in one of two very different ways. One would be that it was a sad ending, because it did not end in the traditional way (i.e., with a woman/damsel "saved by the right man/prince”). The other interpretation would be that it was a very good ending because it requires that a woman learn to love herself and her life without a man. I.e., as Lanagan states on her blog, she does see the more feminist ending as positive – it’s just not the one we associate with Cinderella and the like (up through and including "Pretty Woman," in which the Julia Roberts character gets rescued by a handsome, rich man on a white horse bearing a lance made out of roses).

Feminism really informs much of this book, from designating the women as "tender morsels" to showing the men as exhibiting "boofhead male behaviour" (See interview with Margo Lanagan in Clarkesworld Magazine).

Evaluation: This is a most interesting and thought-provoking retelling of a fairy tale. It didn’t quite win my heart as much as the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment on “Rocky and Bullwinkle” but I loved the idea of upending the usual patriarchal assumptions. To me, much of it was sad, and not because no knight on horseback rescued Liga, but because of all the pain she endured in the beginning, and the shame she felt at the end. I just wanted Liga to be happy! ( )

More than any book I've read lately, Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels (a re-telling of the Germanic fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red," and also an examination of the powers and limits of coping mechanisms after a severe trauma) took me outside my reading comfort zone. For one thing, it is marketed as a "young adult" novel here in the States (on which more later), a classification I don't normally read. For another, it involves elements—parallel dimensions, witches and sorceresses, people transforming into bears and back into people—that mark it as fantastical, and not in a wacky Japanese dream-world way or a surreal David Lynch-type way, but in an undeniably—well—Fantasy type way.

And that, I'm ashamed to say, kinda freaked me out. I'm not claiming it's good or it's right, but there you have it. I am prejudiced enough to have cringed over the more involved magical scenes. Moon-creatures hovering over abysses, witches conjuring portals between two parallel worlds; sorceresses explaining to rooms full of people how this and that magical mechanism functioned—I must admit it gave me pause. I was reliably more engaged whenever Lanagan veered toward the classic "fairy tale" format—iconic rather than developed characters, magic that seems more about allegory than magic-for-magic's-sake, schematic events that move quickly and use a certain, specific kind of heavily simplified language ("Once upon a time, in a cottage at the edge of a forest, there lived a young girl and her brother..."). Certain scenes in Tender Morsels really tapped into that rich, allegorical power that fairytales can have. I got chills during the scene when Liga realizes, after being incestually abused and then gang-raped, that her town has mysteriously been transformed into something that will not hurt or threaten her anymore:


Lucky indeed Liga felt, walking home that day with figs and sugar and good smoke-meat in her basket, and her first lesson with Mistress Taylor set for next afternoon. It was all very different from the noise and bustle and nastiness she had expected to weather in the town; it was very odd to have conjured a headful of terrors and carried them into St. Olafred's, only to discover them all to be unfounded.

          She held her baby close against her breast as she walked along. "How lovely, Branza! Such a different place! How long can it last, do you think? Is it to be ours forever?"

This scene reminded me of the final pages of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, in which Pecola reacts to her father's rape by retreating into a fantasy world where she has achieved her life-long dream of being blue-eyed and having a friend. From the outside, however, it merely looks as though she's walking around talking to the air, flailing her arms like a broken bird. There is a disconnect between perception and reality: suddenly Liga's world is much safer and kinder, her emotions calmer; to her, this is a sign that the harm against her has been magically alleviated, whereas to the reader it's an indication of just how extreme that harm really was.

What I'm getting at by beginning my post with the ways in which my snobbishness sometimes got in the way of my enjoyment of Tender Morsels, is that the novel deserves so much better. Although I wasn't completely riveted at every moment (for a fairy tale, the book is quite long), although it's not up my normal alley, Lanagan's story gave me so much to unpack. It speaks eloquently about the ways in which the richness of life is inextricably bound up with the tragedy and hurt of it, and about how people can reach a point of hurt where their only feasible survival strategy is to cut themselves off from that richness, retreat into a flat safety. So too, it raises fascinating questions about the process of emerging from places of safety—both for the person (in this case Liga) who created the retreat in the first place, and for those (her daughters) who have never known any other reality. On the one hand, Lanagan seems more optimistic than Morrison: we get the sense that Pecola will never emerge from her shattered madness, whereas Liga is pulled from her retreat after twenty-five years, and learns to live in the world and even appreciate what it has to offer. On the other hand, we are also left with a sense that, in certain ways, she has waited too long: by savoring her retreat for so many years, she has permanently missed some of the fullness of real-world existence. She emerges at age 40 with only an adolescent's understanding of certain aspects of life, and it's too late to recoup her losses completely. This seems to me an accurate, if tragic, comment on the experiences of many people with severe trauma early in life: they simply never get the chance to catch up.

Lanagan makes several decisions in Tender Morsels that seem ripe for discussion, and which I didn't completely understand. For example, the narration in the novel switches between third-person (in sections dealing with Liga and her daughters, Branza and Urdda) and a variety of first-person narrators—the rascally but charismatic dwarf Collaby Dought; earnest Davit Ramstrong, who spends three months with Liga as a bear; young Bullock Oxman, who becomes a bear in his own world, against his will. Although Lanagan is plainly interested in the female experience in this novel, it's hard not to notice that all of the characters who actually get a voice here are men. Not even the cackling widow Annie Bywell speaks for herself directly out of the page. Lanagan herself says, in the book's appendix, that she


wanted to make a subtle point about how the men are comfortable imagining themselves as the heroes of their own story, whereas the women always feel themselves to be part of a bigger story that is more significant than their own lives.

I find this explanation unsatisfying. Yes, it is part of male privilege to feel one is the hero of one's own story. But the particular female characters Lanagan creates—in particular Annie, who is selfish and strong-willed enough, certainly more so than Davit Ramstrong, and also Urdda, who has a child's self-centered curiosity until very late in the novel, and who has been raised in a dream-world with her mother at the center, away from patriarchal power structures—I don't believe they think of themselves as more acted-upon than acting, nor that they necessarily see themselves as parts of a larger whole.

I felt the division of narratives works better as an indication of Liga's alienation: how she is, for much of the story, so cut off from her own self and the world around her. The first-person narrators achieve a level of visceral reality that's absent from the third-person sections, which makes sense given that Liga and her daughters are living in a flattened, passionless world. This, for example, is one of my favorite passages from Dought:


There was a certain type of rich feller liked to use me much as a doll is used, to dress me up in tiny clothes and have me pop up around his house, spreading scandal and scampery. And many a year passed in this merry type of employment.

          But I put all of my eggs in one basket with one lord, and off he went and died, didn't he? And what I thought I had coming to me through him, his family felt I ought not to gain—for certainly I had done as he said very well, and their names were all muddied about the place most satisfactory. I got barely a worm-squidge out of them. By dint of being inscrutable, though, I built and built that squidge up, to the point where it all exploded around me in a mess of thieves and cheaters—myself included, I don't deny that—and bills for liquors I and my fellows had drunk but not paid for, meals unremunerated that we had long since shat out.

Liga and Branza, and even Urdda, never get to be quite as vivid as Collaby is here; I kept waiting for the point, after their reentry into the real world, when one of the female characters would assume the first-person voice, but it never happened. I'm torn between thinking this is a fitting statement about the alienating effects of their experiences, individually and as women, and being disappointed because it seems at odds with the more optimistic futures that await Branza and Urdda, not to mention the entire lived reality of Annie.

Another interesting portrayal, I thought, was Urdda's reaction when she learns the truth about her conception. She's utterly devastated, in a way that's made even worse by her earlier sheltered life: she hadn't ever considered that such cruelty and ugliness could exist in the world, much less that it would have engendered her own body. I thought about Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and how the society in that novel is insidious in exposing the children very gradually to the knowledge of their eventual fates. Kathy says that they are always told just slightly more than they can fully understand, so that no revelation ever comes as a shock. Urdda's situation is the exact opposite: most people, I think, learn about the theoretical possibility of violence and rape gradually, and come to accept (for better or worse) living in a world that includes those things, whereas Urdda has been completely sheltered from anything resembling such knowledge, so that when it bursts upon her in a single torrent she is completely overwhelmed with rage and lust for revenge. It's such an understandable and inevitable reaction that I found myself trying to remember when I myself had felt like that: surely, there must have been a time? My own initiations were closer to those in Ishiguro's novel, however, than those in Lanagan's.

But when Urdda finally gets her revenge, almost without meaning to...I'll just say that I felt Lanagan was inserting a bit more fairy-tale quality into the "real world" of her story. Urdda is consumed with rage, and causes her revenge; after the revenge, she wakes up "with no particular feelings at all" about the knowledge she gained the day before. Her inadvertent act of revenge seems to have slated her anger in a way I found allegorically unconvincing. Is it supposed to be part of the magic of the situation that Urdda has come to complete apathy or acceptance (which is it?) of humanity's violence to humanity, and her own subjugated state as a woman, in the space of a single night? Is this change of feeling engendered by violence? I find it hard to believe that any simple act of retribution could really slake such a deep hurt. Is there some kind of key in the fact that the violence Urdda causes is unintentional, or righteous? Either idea strikes an uncomfortable chord in an otherwise beautifully resonant book.

Brutal does not even begin to cover it. Liga's life with her father is a nightmare. It is clear that she is repeatedly raped by her father. It is not graphically described in the text, but is in the forefront of Liga's thoughts often and so often "discussed." The miscarriages he forces her to have through the use of teas and herbs, on the other hand, are described in graphic detail. The fact that Liga has no idea what is happening to her when she miscarries is, I think, part of why they are described in such detail. Even though she thinks about it often, her mind shies away from the acts her father performs on her. Her shame and self-preservation together keep the detail out of these account. As she slowly comes to realize that the rapes, teas, miscarriages, her monthly blood, and babies are all related, each of these acts in her past are revisited. And things don't even get better after Liga's father dies! Left alone in their cottage with only her infant daughter for company, Liga is gang-raped (again, not graphically described, but not exactly glossed over either) by a group of town boys. This is what finally makes her want to end her own, and her baby's, life.

That's the opening of the book. It's hard to read.

The first time I checked this book out of the library, I couldn't read the whole thing. Long before the gang-rape and attempted suicide, I returned the book. I didn't decide to check it out again until the Common Sense debacle with Barnes and Noble came out. Still, I didn't get around to actually checking it out until a few weeks ago. I was determined to get through the horrible parts so that I could see Liga in her heaven, and after reading all of that, I needed to see Liga in her heaven. So many other readers had said that the wretched beginning is worth it once you get to the rest of the story , not to mention that I figured the whole book couldn't be ruined by the opening, given its many awards.

It is worth it.

The rest of the story is a fairytale. It is actually based on Snow White and Rose Red. Once Liga's daughters are old enough to have personalities, Tender Morsels becomes their story. It is about Branza and Urdda learning who they are as people and learning how to make their own way in what is, literally, their mother's world. Their story is beautiful, and I think the ugliness that preceeds it helps to make it so. Urdda grows up to be the awesomely headstrong and smart young woman that I always look for in book. I want a whole other book full of her, especially once she leaves her mother's heaven. Branza's nice too, but I clearly have my favorite.

But here is my dilemma: By the end, I really liked this book and I would love to recommend it, but to whom? I don't agree with the Common Sense rating at Barnes and Noble, that Tender Morsels is not appropriate for anyone under 18, but I do think that I may hesitate to recommend it to young adults that I do not know extremely well. What do you think? For those of you who have read this, to whom do you recommend it? Those of you who haven't, knowing all of the horrible things that happen, do you think you ever will?

Book source: Philly Free Library ( )

A part of you has always known that behind common fairy tales lie stories of intense cruelty. This fairy tale retelling for grownups, like most of such retellings for grownups, brings that cruelty to the forefront of the story.

The story is mainly a retelling of Snow White and Rose Red, with elements of the original Sleeping Beauty (The Sun, The Moon, and Talia). None of the endings are quite as happy as I would have wished for these characters, but it probably couldn't have been done any other way. ( )

Stunning, stark, emotional. One of the most lyrical and rich books I've read in a few years. I bought this for my mom as a birthday present after reading it. Very powerful book. Although of entirely different genres, it reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. ( )

I feel like I've talked about this book so much already that it's silly to give it an official review, but here goes:

This book starts out so brutal that I found myself wondering if such detailed wretchedness was really crucial to the plot. It turns out that it is, and that it must be juxtaposed against the beauty and peace in the book for you to have a full understanding of what is being offered and withheld. Although this is a retelling of Snow White and Rose Red (something I didn't realize until about halfway in), it's also so much more than that. Like the best retellings, it "makes sense" of the odder tidbits in the fairy tale -- the fact that nothing bad ever happened to Snow White, Rose Red, an their mother, falling in love with bears, and a strange gnome obsessed with treasure. But it's also an examination of what you're willing to give up for safety, and the dangers of choosing an imaginary life over a real one. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, the characters and settings vivid and believable. There is both unbearable pain and unbearable sweetness here, and the book brought me to tears several times. The only thing that keeps me from giving the book a five star rating is the fact that it felt like it went on a little too long at the end; some of the ending sequences felt more like a half-hearted sequel than something integral to the plot. Still, I loved this book enough to stay in it even a little longer than I ought. ( )

Remember the Grimm's tale of Snow White and Rose Red? Idyllic cottage life, widow with two very different daughters, friendly bear; abusive, wicked dwarf with his beard stuck in a tree? Remember the greedy dwarf trying to convince the bear to eat the young girls instead of him - "tender morsels" that they were? Well, this is where Lanagan's Tender Morsels gets its core material.

Without giving too much away, the basic story is thus: having been brutalized and raped by her father and a gang of local boys, 15 year old Lida (who has one child by her now-dead father and is unknowingly pregnant again) tries to commit suicide. Instead, she encounters a glowing figure who gives her two jewels and points her home again. Except that her world has been changed into an idyllic version of the same. Here, Liga brings up her two very different daughters and yes, into their lives comes a bear (more than one, in fact) and yes, the girls eventually run into a nasty troll. These turn out to be invasions of the real world into their little heavenly place.

Set in a pre-industrial society somewhere and cast with characters speaking their own antiquated, rural dialects, Tender Morsels, for the most part, 'feels like an old fairy tale—at least at the beginning—but the story becomes more complex as it moves forward. As more of 'real life' breaks into the idyllic, we as readers, watch with our breaths held, to see how these sheltered young women will react and cope—for the idyllic is not real, it's Liga's fantasy and cannot last forever.

I am a great fan of Lanagan's short fiction. She is marketed as YA here in the states but her stories transcend such commercial pigeonholing. And so also Tender Morsels. Sure, there is violence in the story (carefully rendered) but it is essential to counterbalance the idyllic and sweet. And certainly there is sexuality - we are talking about adolescents after all. This is a captivating and ultimately a very moving story. I thought the book a little long, but read the 400+ page book in practically one sitting - if that tells you anything. ( )

I'm having a hard time rating this book, because my enjoyment level varied so much during the reading of it.

The beginning of the book is grim and even gruesome, and the language is a slight barrier to entry (more on both these aspects later). After the first major turn in the story (after the magic starts), I enjoyed it more and more. It was unusual -- dare I say original? -- beautiful, and strange. I loved the girl characters, and the primal appeal of the Bear archetype. There were some parts that dragged toward the end of this middle section, but it was very engaging in general. Here and later, I think the pacing suffered from the long scope of the book (years, even decades.)

After the main conflict resolution, the story seemed somewhat uneven. There were parts about the characters' growth and changes which were quite deft and interesting, but with three protagonists' lives unfolding in third person and sections from other characters inserted in first person, it sometimes felt aimless and lacking in narrative drive. However, I cared about the characters and wanted to know how their lives progressed.

The language throughout the book is a little unusual, with the first-person sections especially repurposing words. "She suddenlied" for "she said suddenly", or "intimated" for "was intimate with" (she may spell or notate these differently than I have, as I listened to the audiobook.) This worked to an extent to create a sense of difference and archaism, but it occasionally seemed forced and created a barrier to understanding. Certainly the dialect and word use in the initial, grimmest sections were rather heavy going.

Despite its flaws, the book has beautiful characters and motifs, strange and striking images that seem to come from forgotten fairy tales, and an unusual, haunting world. It has powerful themes of survival, healing, love and freedom. However, I wouldn't recommend it as a light read, or for anyone who's triggered by sexual violence.

Audiobook notes: The female reader, who does most of the reading, did a beautiful job and had a lovely, perfect accent. The male reader seemed a little hammy (as he has on other audiobooks I've heard) and didn't make the odd verbiage any easier to swallow. Section breaks in the third person narrative were either read or edited too close together, so be prepared for shifts in focus, place and time with not even a pause for breath! Lastly, if you have an old, decrepit CD player, the short tracks on the CDs may cause it to hang. I solved this by digging up a discman with skip protection -- it had no trouble at all.

That concludes my review, but I have a few thoughts and questions, below.

Turn aside now, dear reader, if you don't want spoilers about the first few chapters.

I am not a habitual reader of modern YA fiction. I've heard that it deals with plenty of harsh subjects, and when I was 12-18, I read mostly adult fiction. But I was powerfully affected as a teenager by much less detailed rape scenes than those in Tender Morsels. A gang rape Mercedes Lackey described in one matter-of-fact sentence gave me dry heaves when I was twelve (and I still remember the sentence, all these years later.) Those here are not graphic, but they are evocative -- the dialogue attributed to the rapists, the way the character describes her experiences -- and the situations are detailed. On the one hand, I admire the really meaningful themes of survival and recovery from trauma that are masterfully rendered in this book. On the other hand, I wonder how this is received by the "young adult" readership*.

The sexual abuse is introduced within the first chapter or two of the book, along with some really disturbing descriptions of the girl's miscarriage. It only gets more and more disturbing. Are young readers going to keep going through all that pain and degradation? I understand why it's there, on multiple levels, but I was surprised at the detail and at how front-loaded it was. I know I have YA authors and YA readers among my friends: do you have any input on this?

Feminist sidenote: This story does an amazing job of defining rape culture, partly by negation.

*Obviously, some people in the age range have personal experience of sexual abuse and assault. But that's hardly a guarantee they want to read about it, and I'd expect a good proportion of those readers to be put off or triggered by the content, which means they wouldn't get to all the good stuff about healing and growing. ( )

To date unfinished. Extremely brutal and disturbing beginning, very descriptive which slows the plot, a reworking of a Grimm's fairytale, ( )

There are mixed reviews regarding this book. I found the writing good, but the story line was far too troubling, graphic and disturbing for my taste. It is a fairytale retelling of Rose Red/Rose White. It missed the mark. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but disappointing enough that while I wanted to know the ending, I should have closed the book long before I did. ( )

Reviewed by LadyJay for TeensReadToo.com

Liga has been mistreated all of her life. Her father is a monster; preying upon her at night in the midst of his drunken stupors. Liga's mother is dead, and cannot protect her daughter from the wickedness in the world.

Because of this, Liga is made a mother too early. In an act of desperation, Liga decides to kill her first child, believing that she will be better off in another place. A magic "moon-babby" takes pity on Liga and offers her an alternate universe to raise her daughters.

For many years, Urdda, Branza, and Liga are safe; no one can do them harm. Eventually, the boundaries of their world are infiltrated, and the three women must leave their paradise. Their new task; to survive in a world full of both cruelty and kindness, something that Liga thought she would never have to face again.

The basis for TENDER MORSELS is the story of Snow White and Rose Red. Two sisters must battle a dwarf and rescue a man from a witch's curse. Lanagan has included these pivotal plot details while still making the story her own.

There are many interesting twists that Lanagan has included in the novel. Her use of vocabulary and language is also very unique. The story may appear daunting to readers at first, but those who give it a chance will be greatly rewarded. ( )