Tender Morsels

For anyone who has read this book, the beginning is the absolute worst.

Not that it is badly written or boring. Hell no. It's all the incest, forced abortion, rape, and attempted suicide.

By the way, this is a YA. My inner critic was cursing and carrying on and wondering how the hell I could get through this freaking grimdark nightmare.

And then it lightened up. Got magical. Got heavenly. Sometimes it even got humorous. And then it became a retelling of Snow White. With the magicked prince that is a bear. And then it became a different kind of story. One about healing. About redemption. About power. And about finding one's way in the world. Or worlds. Or within timelines, dreamlands, and Fae-ish realms.

There's a lot of characters in here, show more and I won't deny that I didn't care for some and always perked up for others, but reading about the dwarf was always particularly interesting. He's not a nice man but he's not a complete tool like some we encountered.

This is not an easy book to read. Emotionally. The text is quite beautiful. But damn, this fable holds no punches. show less

Book content warnings:
child abuse
rape
incest

Okay, so I'm not familiar with the fairytale "Snow-White and Rose-Red", so I can't say how closely this novel follows, varies, or fleshes out the original tale.

What I do know is that this book (like the other Margo Lanagan book I've read: The Brides of Rollrock Island) doesn't read like YA. It also . . . doesn't seem very appropriate for a young adult audience. I know people love to bend the rules of YA and all that, but still . . . this seems a bit much:
- there is a scene where a bear kills and eats a man (whose POV the reader experiences earlier). this scene is GRAPHIC--including skull crunching, etc.
- there is a scene where one of the main characters (as a young girl, then) feels excited by show more a bear (a man enchanted as a bear, but she doesn't know this--so he's literally a bear). She mentions in her POV how she doesn't know if she does or doesn't want his erect (bear) penis to touch her.

The book is about tragedy and recovery and deals with topics a mostly older audience would connect with. It also speaks from POVs that are racist, heteronormative, and prejudiced without being challenged, which isn't so great for young readers who 1. might already have these thoughts and now feel justified, or 2. now adopt these harmful ideas.

OK. On to the book itself.

Tender Morsels is a story told in two parallel worlds: the heavenly world Liga and her two daughters live in, and the "real" world she escaped. The plot comes together when the border between those two worlds starts to become less solid. Multiple characters come and go, and it starts to cause problems in both places, and for Liga's daughters, who never knew anything but happiness growing up in Liga's heaven.

In the beginning, all the different POVs were confusing. They're not announced with a separate chapter or name. Some use first person perspective, some third person. As the book went on, it was easier to read, but the reason for using this technique is a little confusing. The characters in the "real" world used first person, but when the characters from "heaven" came over into the real world, they retained the third person perspective, which confused me. Eventually I just accepted it and read on.

As always, Margo Lanagan's writing is perfection. I haven't read anything better than her prose. Honestly, she makes the best sentences and sentence flow. If you want to read good prose, read Margo Lanagan.

However, I see "dark" all over the tags and reviews for this book. But why does "dark" for fictional worlds in any medium always mean in increase of violence against women? It always feels like a lack of creativity on the creator's part.

The world here is one that's obviously Western European (inspired by Germany, probably, since Snow-White and Rose-Red is a Grimm story), but I could've done without the anti-poc descriptions like "foreigner" and dialogue like "why is he sooty-faced?", etc.

There's also the hatred of little people that seems completely out of nowhere? The book makes fun of the character, Collaby, in the narratives of the good people in the book. And Collaby, of course, is one of the awful characters, driven by endless greed. He becomes a nightmarish picture for one of Liga's girls, who then thinks ill of all little people. This idea is never corrected.

I'm a little disappointed by the resolving of the climax. The characters I've come to know don't need to do anything more than a social call, and the problem is fixed. It seems far too easy and convenient.

And after this climax (which hardly feels like one? Is there a climax in this book? It really doesn't follow a recognizable format--at least to me, not that that in itself is a bad thing). But things drag on at the end. When I thought the book was wrapping up, it evidently wasn't, because things kept happening. I ended up getting really impatient for the book to just be over.

Overall, the concept of this book is so cool, but the book itself didn't do it for me (even as a surviver myself). show less

An astonishing novel, with an opening that is both harrowing and upsetting. Liga is abused first by her father abd then, after his death, a group of boys. On the verge of suicide, she is granted a safe haven to raise her two daughters in peace and safety. The real wold intrudes, howver, and one of her daughters longs for escape. In rich, earthy, rhythmic prose, Lanagan reworks the Grimm fairy tale into a meditation on suffering and consolation, freedom and restriction. Funny, horrifying, bittersweet and uplifting, this is a major piece of literature, Young Adult or otherwise.

Very rarely does a book of such high quality twist my stomach into knots. Tender Morsels is definitely one of the most disturbing books I have read, but it is also a triumph in the beauty of modern fairy tales.

After undergoing tremendous amounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse from a number of men, fifteen year old Liga, along with her two infant daughters, magically transports herself to the world of her heart's desire. Here she rears her daughters in a land where the men are distant, shy, and respectful. Years later, however, Liga's world comes crashing down when Urdda disappears and a witch arrives, disrupting Liga's precious dream and forcing her to step back into the real world with all its hardships and memories.

Fifteen-year-old Liga has suffered terrible abuse, sexual and otherwise, at the hands of her father. When he dies, she experiences a brief period of relief, only to find herself subjected to still more suffering in the form of a brutal rape by five young men who regard a girl alone as an easy target. Hurt and full of despair, she goes into the woods with the intention of committing suicide, only to encounter an unexpected magic that sends her into another world, a world free of danger, fear, and unkindness, where she can raise the two daughters who resulted from her abuse in peace. But that world is not exactly real, and it is not possible to stay there forever.

Although you wouldn't guess it from that description, this is based on the show more fairy tale "Snow White and Rose Red." (Not to be confused with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," which is an entirely different story, featuring six more dwarfs than this one.) It's an odd fairy tale, really, and it perhaps makes for a bit of an odd novel, but it's an absorbing one. It's very well written, with compelling characters and a subtle sense of fairy tale enchantment, and by the end I found it rather emotionally affecting. But it's also a disturbing story, full of distressing events. Needless to say, those who find descriptions of sexual assault and related horrors unbearable to read should stay away. Those scenes generally aren't exactly graphically depicted, but, man, they don't need to be. And the novel's constant depiction of men -- of most men -- as dangerous sexual predators is deeply depressing, and, for me, at least, almost got to be a little too much. show less

Though I thought [b:Tender Morsels|2662169|Tender Morsels|Margo Lanagan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320416424s/2662169.jpg|2687395] was a fantastically-written and unbelievably well-imagined story, my first instinct is to throw my hands up in warning at any teenager (or - in fact - any adult) who might come strolling along in search of just another typical fairytale retelling. Because that's what this is in it's barest form, it is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm's tale of [b:Rose Red & Snow White: A Grimms Fairy Tale|81081|Rose Red & Snow White A Grimms Fairy Tale|Ruth Sanderson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170993589s/81081.jpg|572329]. And don't we all just love the call of the "dark" retellings? We imagine blood and gore show more and perhaps sex... what I don't think the majority of people imagine is incest, gory miscarriages, gang rapes and bestiality.

I kid you not... in just the first couple of chapters we are introduced to Liga - a girl who has been repeatedly raped by her father and then forced to drink some gut-churning concoctions in order to force the abortion of any pregnancies - and we see the absolute horrors of sexual abuse she has lived through that have made her the person she later becomes. A person who is so afraid that her fear manifests into a powerful magic which allows Liga to create for herself and her daughters - Branza and Urdda - a world separate from that of reality. A world where the three of them can hide in harmony.

But Liga's attempts to shield her daughters from the cruelty of the real world ultimately fail. Branza becomes a slave to the same fears that plagued her mother, and Urdda's wild curiosity gets the better of her. After time, the border starts to blur between the real world and this magical realm of Liga's imagination.

I was utterly enthralled by the story and by the strength of Ms Lanagan's characters. Above all else, she is undoubtedly a brilliant writer. But... THIS IS NOT A YOUNG ADULT BOOK. It just isn't. Never before have I read a book so wrongly categorised. Even if teens were ready to stomach this kind of brutality and blatant sexuality, I don't think the average teenager would appreciate this kind of story anyway.

There's a lot of dark, unhealthy sexual stuff going on in [b:Tender Morsels|2662169|Tender Morsels|Margo Lanagan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320416424s/2662169.jpg|2687395]. I don't mind sex in books, I don't mind lots of sex in books, but even I found it hard to stomach the repeated rapes, incest and bestiality. I honestly didn't know what to think when a girl gets a sexual thrill from having a bear lick her breast... this just takes perversity to a whole new level. And was that whole thing really necessary? Hmm?

Unlike most books that I rate highly, I refuse to recommend this to anyone in particular. It is too strange and gross and disturbing for me to be confident that anyone will like it. You will have to be quite the adventurous reader and you will have to be able to cringe and move on at some of the weirdest bits. But I doubt you'll be unaffected, that's for sure. Now I'm going to go ponder what it says about me that I was unmoved by [b:Wonder|11387515|Wonder|R.J. Palacio|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309285027s/11387515.jpg|16319487] and thought this dark, rapey novel was actually really good. show less

Summary: Liga Longfield has had to endure more suffering than most 15-year-olds can even begin to imagine: her father keeps her shut away in their cabin in the woods and subjects her to the most horrific physical and sexual abuse. The rest of the world seems no better; after she is gang-raped and impregnated by a group of local boys, she runs away, fleeing with her elder daughter (by her father), and intent on killing herself and the child before either can endure any more misery.

Before she can go through with it, she is saved by a glowing moon-bab and sent to her personal heaven, where she can raise her daughters Branza and Urdda in complete peace and safety. However, her isolated heaven cannot last forever... A local mud-witch has show more accidentally sent a greedy dwarven man into Liga's heaven, and that rash act has weakened the boundaries between fantasy and reality, allowing the occasional interchange between the worlds - most often during the Bear Day festival, when men dressed in bear-skins run through the town, pawing at whatever women they can find and celebrating the return of spring. Even with these incursions, Liga's content to stay put, although her daughters secretly yearn for the wider world. But after living so long in the blissful safety of heaven, how will any of them be able to handle the harsh truths of reality?

Review: I loved almost everything about this book, with one big exception. I'll start with the good stuff: First, I absolutely love good fairy tale retellings, particularly ones that recognize the more disturbing aspects lurking in most stories. And, if I wanted a retelling that comes at a familiar story from a completely new (and dark) angle, I don't think I could have done much better than Tender Morsels. The bones of the Snow White & Rose Red story are there, but they're fleshed out in a way that's thoroughly original and yet still manages to maintain an other-worldly fairy tale feeling.

The message of the story, too, is one that I haven't seen addressed in fantasy often - or at least not this well. The real world is depicted as so brutally horrible that you can't fault Liga for retreating into her heaven, but the reader is slowly drawn out and convinced of the benefits of living in the real world, even when it's a world in which most people have to struggle to achieve a happiness that they may never find. The writing and the language used throughout is gorgeous; lyrical and lovely and completely in line with the magical-yet-real folktale feeling of the worlds it was creating.

The *one* thing that kept this book from being excellent was the length, and the pacing. Stories have a kind of inherent rhythm and pace (and I'd argue this is particularly true of fairy tales.) Read enough of them, and you start to be able to pick out where you are in the story, and roughly how much should be left before the end. During Tender Morsels, however, when we reached the point where I was thinking "Okay, this is about halfway through the story", I was only on disc 4 of 12. And, similarly, we reached the point where I was figuring we were closing in on the end... and it was only disc 9. From there, multiple places where the book could have ended satisfactorily flew past, but instead it stopped abruptly with a scene which didn't feel like a proper conclusion. I think an editing knife could also have been taken to some parts in the middle to improve the flow - for example, the third Bear Day plotline could easily have been sacrificed without affecting the main story at all.

I also had a minor problem with the point-of-view jumps. Not with the multiple POV format itself; I think that actually added to the story. My problem was mostly with the audiobook production and readers, who would go from one character's POV straight into another without any demarcation or change of voice, which often wound up being rather confusing.

In any case, while the off-putting rhythm and pacing problems were enough for me to dock this book some points in the final analysis, I never stopped listening, and I was always completely absorbed by the story, even if I never quite got a handle on where it was going. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: This book is most emphatically NOT for everyone. Particularly in the early chapters, it is brutally and intensely dark - we're talking incest, physical abuse, forced abortion, gang rape, some implied-if-not-explicit bestiality, etc. If any of that stuff is an automatic deal-breaker for you, then you're best off passing this one by. For those who can deal with the nastiness, though, there's a disturbingly beautiful, fascinatingly complex, and lyrically written story here that shouldn't be missed by fans of fantasy and fairy-tales. show less