Reviews for Tender Morsels

The average rating for Tender Morsels based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-25 00:00:00 Todd Chidester this is a book that concerns itself with damage and healing. and i think it is a very powerful book filled with Important Lessons. my only problem with it is that there are too many voices, too many characters, which i think makes for a strained and disjointed read. there were so many voices, it became hard to care about any one of them individually.this is not always a problem for me in fiction- i love sprawling narratives, but in this book, i think the real strength of perspective was found in the characters of liga and her daughters. and ramstrong. i found the other interludes to be distracting me from what i had anticipated to be the main focus of the narrative: the aftereffects of serial brutalities, and the psychological reserves to which humans resort. i love the premise of this book. i love the cloaking of real-world atrocities in a fairy-tale shell. i think many of the best fairy-tales do that already. this one did not avoid the difficult or the painful, which is something i have become appreciative of, in australian YA fiction specifically. and i thought that in parts, it was very affecting. the scene at the end between ramstrong and liga, made me sadder than anything that had happened to her before, and it was such a wonderfully strong scene for her.this is the power of excellent women's fiction targeting a younger audience. i think what i would have liked to have seen is this book just laid out differently. to have the "liga and her daughters" story separate from the story of noer and bullock,etc. maybe as a series of stories that interlocked but didn't necessarily interrupt the others. because while many of the themes are overlapping, in their focus on metamorphosis and the burden of humanity, and the inheritance of pain and all of that, they were not necessarily in dialogue with each other, and i felt that their intrusion lessened the emotional impact of the liga story, which i still feel was the most developed and the most important, as all others were offshoots of her actions. i think this is a very necessary and ballsy book. and i think the ideas it explores are terrifically important. i just worry that some of it might be getting lost to readers just trying to keep the characters straight, with their relationships to each other and their distinct worlds. all in all, it is an excellent book. i am probably being stingy with my three stars. come to my blog!

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-11 00:00:00 Jason Herrera Though I thought Tender Morsels 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 Rose Red & Snow White: A Grimms Fairy Tale. And don't we all just love the call of the "dark" retellings? We imagine blood and gore 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 Tender Morsels. 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 Wonder and thought this dark, rapey novel was actually really good.