I didn't know what I was getting into when I pulled this book off the library shelf. I'd heard the name of it bandied about on other blogs, and I'd heard it recommended by people whose tastes I generally trust, but my knowledge of the book itself was something like: another YA fairytale retelling? Maybe? Kind of...dark?
Hoo boy.
For one thing, I don't know how many teenagers I'd give this one to. For another, it's not trying to retell any one existing fairytale that I'm aware of, though it has elements woven through it that seem very familiar in an old, forest-dark, Brothers Grimm kind of a way. It's set in two worlds: the 'true' world, and an 'ideal' world, or personal heaven, to which a young woman called Liga escapes with her daughters. The book is about the reasons for that escape, and what happens when the barriers between the worlds start to break down. I won't say a lot more about the plot itself because I found that going into it with no expectations was actually a good way to do it.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to twig to the fact that this is, starkly and insistently, a book about rape culture. It's about female sexuality. It's about the policing of female sexuality, and the ownership of it, and how difficult it is to understand your own emerging sexuality as a growing girl enmeshed in a society that keeps trying to tell you how and when and to what extent you should be exercising it. (It's also, well, about rape and sexual abuse of children, and while the scenes are never graphically described, I imagine it would be very triggering for some.)
The other main theme is related, but wider in scope. It asks the questions: to what extent can we, and to what extent should we, protect our children? Where do we draw the line between sheltering their innocence and keeping them wilfully ignorant? Given power and choice, should life be enjoyed, or should it be lived? Should it be narrow and comfortable, or painful and rich? Lanagan never flinches from portraying these questions, and the characters caught up in them, as complex and morally conflicted. She doesn't lead us easily towards the answers, and she doesn't pretend that good will always win out, even though the pursuit and possibility of justice is another theme that shines through.
There were a couple of niggling complaints that I had with the book as a whole; most significantly, I found the pacing to fall entirely flat. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through the book that I found myself wanting to keep turning the pages to find out What Would Happen Next; up until that point some things had happened, sure, but I hadn't been given any sense of overarching plot or tension. That said, I was interested enough in the characters and the subtle world-building to keep going, and everything did more or less draw together by the end.
Tender Morsels is a dark fairytale. But the creeping insidious horror of the book isn't any particular monster, or any one evil villain; it's the hovering phantom of male control over female sexuality, the phantom of rape culture. By the end of it I felt bruised and shaken and furious on behalf of the characters, and on behalf of everyone who's ever had to put up with misogynist language and entitlement and sexual harrassment and communities structured in such a way so as to endorse sexual double standards. This book will make you angry. Read it anyway. Read it because.
For one thing, I don't know how many teenagers I'd give this one to. For another, it's not trying to retell any one existing fairytale that I'm aware of, though it has elements woven through it that seem very familiar in an old, forest-dark, Brothers Grimm kind of a way. It's set in two worlds: the 'true' world, and an 'ideal' world, or personal heaven, to which a young woman called Liga escapes with her daughters. The book is about the reasons for that escape, and what happens when the barriers between the worlds start to break down. I won't say a lot more about the plot itself because I found that going into it with no expectations was actually a good way to do it.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to twig to the fact that this is, starkly and insistently, a book about rape culture. It's about female sexuality. It's about the policing of female sexuality, and the ownership of it, and how difficult it is to understand your own emerging sexuality as a growing girl enmeshed in a society that keeps trying to tell you how and when and to what extent you should be exercising it. (It's also, well, about rape and sexual abuse of children, and while the scenes are never graphically described, I imagine it would be very triggering for some.)
The other main theme is related, but wider in scope. It asks the questions: to what extent can we, and to what extent should we, protect our children? Where do we draw the line between sheltering their innocence and keeping them wilfully ignorant? Given power and choice, should life be enjoyed, or should it be lived? Should it be narrow and comfortable, or painful and rich? Lanagan never flinches from portraying these questions, and the characters caught up in them, as complex and morally conflicted. She doesn't lead us easily towards the answers, and she doesn't pretend that good will always win out, even though the pursuit and possibility of justice is another theme that shines through.
There were a couple of niggling complaints that I had with the book as a whole; most significantly, I found the pacing to fall entirely flat. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through the book that I found myself wanting to keep turning the pages to find out What Would Happen Next; up until that point some things had happened, sure, but I hadn't been given any sense of overarching plot or tension. That said, I was interested enough in the characters and the subtle world-building to keep going, and everything did more or less draw together by the end.
Tender Morsels is a dark fairytale. But the creeping insidious horror of the book isn't any particular monster, or any one evil villain; it's the hovering phantom of male control over female sexuality, the phantom of rape culture. By the end of it I felt bruised and shaken and furious on behalf of the characters, and on behalf of everyone who's ever had to put up with misogynist language and entitlement and sexual harrassment and communities structured in such a way so as to endorse sexual double standards. This book will make you angry. Read it anyway. Read it because.
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