I'd like to go out on a limb here, and say that nothing in the world of adult summer reading can compare with the revolutionary content of a novel you are likely to find in the young adult section of your local bookshop. Tender Morsels, by the Australian author Margo Lanagan, is funny, tragic, wise, tender and beautifully written. It also left me gasping with shock.
Lanagan bases her story on "Snow White and Rose Red" from the Brothers Grimm, opening in that lonely hut at the edge of a dark wood that has become a familiar landmark in the geography of fear. From the first paragraph we are transported to an authentically dark place that hums with cruelty and perversion; it seems only right to warn those tempted to buy the book for precocious young readers that the early chapters of Tender Morsels are filled with acts of sexual violence - the sort that feel more, not less, terrifying for being presented in folkloric style.
In this miserable hut lives innocent 15-year-old Liga, whose mother has died, leaving her to fulfil the role of wife for her brute of a father. Pregnant by him and forced to miscarry, she soon falls pregnant again. Even when her father is killed, there is no simple liberation - Liga is left alone and vulnerable in a world overrun with evil. What follows includes not a whit of graphic detail, but its awfulness requires none. Images of pursuit and panic are simply drawn, straight out of a child's nightmare.
While pregnant with her second baby, Liga sets out to end her miserable life and is magically removed to a parallel world, a perfect personal heaven devoid of threat. It is an emotionally neutral place, calm, happy and - crucially - without men. The heroine is barely more relieved than the reader.
And yet, heaven or no heaven, it is impossible to forget that Liga's beloved daughters are products of father-daughter incest and gang rape. The two little girls grow up safe and happy in their fairytale version of a gated community, but a great darkness lurks just beneath the surface.
Lanagan's credentials as a fantasy writer come to the fore as holes begin to appear between the real world and Liga's heaven. Two bears pass through the membrane, one bringing something gentle and male into this all-female place, the other with a strong whiff of corruption - a disturbing pink tongue and a voracious sexual appetite.
And then, in the way of fairytale children as well as the real sort, Liga's younger daughter Urdda crosses over into the other world, seduced by the fierce fruits it offers: passion, goodness, evil, sex and love. The real world may be raw and full of risks, but it draws the child inexorably with the ultimate lure - the lure of truth.
Gradually, the unwavering safety Liga has chosen for her children begins to reveal itself for what it is: an inability to engage in a world of unthinkable realities. Her suicide may have been effective after all, albeit philosophically. But is it possible to return to life from unspeakable trauma?
Lanagan handles a variety of points of view and a large cast of humans and animals with great delicacy and restraint. Her characters grapple with the terrible damages inflicted by life and the inevitability of death, and although she offers them (and us) no easy consolation, the book celebrates human resilience and unexpected gifts: "children touched with charm, clueless that it was within them; maids whose frivolous fortune-telling always held a grain of truth; mothers and wives whose soups were as good as medicines; men who attracted luck, or women who sped healing". Hope, for Liga, resides in her children and their talents, but at no little cost to her own heart's desire.
Mature teen readers will love Tender Morsels; I would have devoured it at 15, though not more enthusiastically than I did last week. It is with a mixture of respect and delight that I greet any book capable of blasting an entire genre out of the water with its audacity and grace. Tender Morsels is such a book.
Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people’s are, lines of stories combed out again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke. Seal life already makes perfect sense, and needs no explanation.
Margo Lanagan, Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island)
I just gave a romance novel (The Best Man's Problem by Sera Taíno) four stars on Goodreads. Prior to that, the last two books I gave four stars were The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan and Passing by Nella Larson.
These are wildly different books.
The Best Man's Problem is an enemies-to-lovers, opposites attract somewhat spicy mlm romance that I read in about two hours. The Brides of Rollrock Island is a harrowing, folktale-adjacent story about generational trauma. Passing is about the lives of two light-skinned Black women in the 1920s, one of whom lives as a white woman.
Of the three, Passing is probably the one that would get the stamp of being "highbrow". It got an artsy film adaptation and everything. My motivation for reading them was entirely different: I wanted to read Passing out of curiosity, I had heard about the movie and wanted to read the book to educate myself. The Brides of Rollrock Island I read because I love the author's work and I knew it would make me feel melancholy and achy in the best way. The Best Man's Problem I read because I wanted to have a comfortable, easy and enjoyable read in the space of an afternoon.
They all got four stars because they all matched that motivation very well. They didn't change my life (I'm stingy with five stars, sue me), but I enjoyed every one of these books a lot for the purpose I set out to read them.
It just feels really weird to me to rate them all on the same scale, because I'm rating them very subjectively. Did this book give me what I wanted out of it? Yes. Four stars.
I know there are people out there who rate via categories that seem more empirical. And to a degree, I guess that makes sense. But rating craft, like beautiful sentence structure, word choice, dialogue...I mean, I could do all those things, but it would still be subjective. I think The Brides of Rollrock Island is probably the most beautiful of the three in craft terms; someone else might choose something else.
More dangerously, if you read across the board, like me, that leads to a trend towards giving more points to "serious" literature and less to genre fiction. It's no secret people kind of look down on romance as a genre, especially explicit romance, especially especially explicit romance starring lgbtq+ leads of color, all of which is true of the example I'm using. It's "easy" reading, predictable and often formulaic, true, but if that's what you're after, why shouldn't that be worth the same as a more complex book when you're in a different mood?
I don't know that I have a point here, I guess what I'm saying is:
Rating everything we read numerically is not really all that helpful.
Therefore, I have elected radical individualism and rate solely based on the criterion of how happy reading a book made me.
