How would you rate tender morsels? I really want to read it. I know is YA but I’ve heard it deals with very sensitive topics.
I liked it, but I thought it was kind of clumsily constructed as a larger narrative. There’s just a bit too much going on in it? The author keeps adding in POVs and subplots, which are distracting in a book so short. Also the narrative focus shifts halfway through in a way that I didn’t love
Basically, at face value it’s a Snow White and Rose Red retelling, but the story opens with their mother, Liga, as a teen protagonist herself. This is where most of the darker subject matter comes in
Liga suffers a lot, and it’s difficult to warn for without laying out the entire story. The book deals with parent-child incest, sexual abuse, gang rape, and pregnancy from rape. I personally thought it handled the topics sensitively where they were present
But basically we see this character being put through multiple horrible, extremely cruel circumstances, and coming out of it wanting to retreat from the entire world into a kinder sort of dream reality, and raising two children there who upon growing up, feel smothered, and try to escape to experience life in the real world for themselves. From that point on, the story is about them, and Liga fades into the background. And honestly that made me so sad!
We see Liga gradually healing within her dream world, but also the purpose of the story is basically in leaving that space. And that it’s more about her daughters building lives and relationships for themselves while she doesn’t get the same sort of development was the most disappointing part to me
Overall though, I’m not upset that I read it, and I mostly think of the book positively
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.
The feeling of being a man inside a bear inside their brushing had my whole skin and brain busy. They were brushing a bear into existence from my matter - I began to sense and then to see that I had claws, that I had paws, as they did their delicate work upon them.
It’s a beautiful sunny day today, which might not seem like that big a deal except that we’ve had a string of of those brooding dark iron-grey days where there’s little difference between noon and twilight, other than night coming even earlier than usual. So for all that it’s only supposed to last for a day or so, I’m glad to have the break.
What I’ve just finished reading
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. I note right off the bat that the day Solzhenitsyn relates to us is a pretty good one, all told—the various gambles our title character undertakes in order to find minor alleviations to the privations of camp life (swiping an extra bowl of oatmeal at lunch, for instance, or hiding away a hacksaw blade in his mitten despite the threat of solitary confinement if it’s found during searches) all pay off, and he manages to avoid the ever-present threat of violence from either the guards or the other prisoners. It’s a clever approach, as it both keeps the narrative from becoming unreadably depressing (it’s not hard to imagine what life is like on the less-good days) and also shows exactly how close to the line many prisoners live, as such tiny things bring such intense pleasure.
That said...I think I’m supposed to admire our protagonist’s scrappy resourcefulness and determination to continue under such unforgiving circumstances—and I do!—but the strongest emotion that his story stirs in me is grief—there’s so much human potential being wasted in these camps and for such objectively ridiculous reasons. I think that might ultimately be where I have trouble with so much Russian literature—culturally, so many of their stories involve people at the mercy of their environment, whether the harsh natural environment or the harsher artificially-constructed society. And they either struggle against it and are miserable, or find some way to exist within it and find a measure of peace. Whereas I, being by nature more of a big-picture person, just sort of sit here shaking my head and thinking but it doesn’t have to be like this...even though I realize that’s beside the point. For those people living in that world, it does, because there’s nothing they can do to change it.
I find that a very uncomfortable place to be in, mentally, which probably explains a lot about how tough I’ve found it to exist in America in 2020.
(@coffeeandchemicals? @thisisnotmolchanka? I would love your input here. Is my reading way off?)
What I’m currently reading
Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan. This is definitely the sort of story that gives you pause before describing anyone’s “fairytale life”. The stark and terrible realities of Liga’s life under the thumb of a cruel and controlling father, and then later as a woman unprotected, are softened a bit by some truly lovely prose that gives equal weight to the little poetic moments of beauty as to the deeply-engrained awfulness. I appreciate the focus on Liga’s internality, as well—it does a lot to make her a character in her own right, rather than simply a victim.
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. I’m about a fifth of the way in, and while the plot’s taking a little bit of time getting started, I am absolutely living for Gideon and Harrowhawk’s chemistry. The sheer and utter loathing they harbor for each other, despite having been thrown together by circumstance, practically throws off sparks—I’ve found myself giggling maniacally more than once, which is probably disconcerting when I’m listening via headphones. (Props to the audiobook narrator too; she clearly relishes these characters just as much as I do.) I’m genuinely uncertain if I want this to be an enemies-to-lovers story or an enemies-to-world-shattering-nemeses story or some combination of the above; I may not be sure where their relationship (or the story) is going but I’m completely convinced it’s not going to be boring.
What I plan to read next
Honestly, I’m not sure right now; I’ve got a lot on my plate for the next couple of weeks so I have a feeling my current books will keep me occupied for the next week or two. Still, there’s no shortage of books in my TBR pile...
Fanfiction spotlight
“Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”, by @porthos4ever. After the events of Dark City, Daniel Schreiber finds himself in the not-entirely-uncomfortable role of potential check to John Murdoch’s godlike powers. But as his feelings grow, so does the complexity of the role he’s assigned himself. Can love really exist when you hold the key to your near-omnipotent beloved’s destruction? But without it, wouldn’t the imbalance of power tear the relationship apart?
If you know me at all, you know I adore complicated love stories, where the space between genuine affection and manipulation is grey and vast, and the balance of power tips back and forth unexpectedly. This is a beautifully-written example—I love the way their growing trust allows them to navigate the choppy waters of their dynamic. And I’m pretty sure there’s a very indirect reference to an early-2000s pop song in there, which I feel slightly smug for having picked up on.
“There is something about talking in the night, with the shreds of sleep around your ears, with the silences between one remark and another, the town dark and dreaming beyond your own walls.
It draws the truth out of you, straight from its little dark pool down there, where usually you guard it so careful, and wave your hands over it and hum and haw to protect people's feelings, to protect your own.
You can bring out the jaggedest feelings… into the night quiet. They will float there for consideration, harming no one.”
