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The first sentence—“there are plenty would call her a slut for it”—tips the reader off right away that this may not be the most kid-friendly of YA novels. In fact, Margo Lanagan strips past the implicitly brutal foundations of the Grimm fairy tales to reveal the savagery of a world from which such a tale of female refuge could spring. We speed past Grimm territory very quickly.

Providing a back story for her version of the Grimm Brothers’ ‘Snow White and Rose Red,” Lanagan places it in a harsh world—the dark doppelganger of Disney enchanted forests and wicked witches. In this story, the witches are not wicked although a few are a bit naïve and unwittingly create chaos out of the best intentions. The real wickedness lies in the hearts and loins of lustful men.

Liga is a traumatized teenager, left in the care of her cruel father after her mother’s death. Repeatedly molested and impregnated by this person on whom she placed her trust, her spirit is broken and she fruitlessly seeks deliverance. After two miscarriages brought on by tinctures purchased by her father from a local midwife/witch, the third results in a living, breathing baby girl. The discovery that her father has been killed in an apparent accident is small consolation for Liga. There are more brutes where her father came from and, knowing she now lives alone and defenseless, five of the younger breed pursue and trap her back in her cottage. In stylistic acknowledgment to the YA genre, Lanagan refrains from describing either the previous molestation from Liga’s father or the gang rape that results in a second baby growing inside her. She doesn’t need to. What she has written evokes the brutal betrayal of a child’s innocence and the post-traumatic, existential despair that results from it, far more powerfully than if every sexual assault had been painstakingly depicted.

After a failed suicide attempt by jumping off a cliff Liga and her babies is transported to a parallel world, a twilight zone-like Heaven/Haven of her heart’s desire where she and her babies can live in safety and without fear.

Summarizing the rest of the novel would not only take up too much space but deviate from what I want to convey about this novel. As anyone familiar with ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red’ may have surmised, the first baby, Branza, is the Snow White surrogate and the second, Urdda, is Rose Red. Like the original, ‘Tender Morsels’ contains a disagreeable, avaricious dwarf and a bear that transforms into a man. How the dwarf and the bear enter Liga’s Heaven world is due entirely to the unwitting carelessness of the clueless witch, Muddy Annie (the former ‘slut’ from the first sentence). A membrane between the worlds has been tampered with and ripped with repeated use (primarily by the dwarf, Collaby Dought) so that the temporal continuum between the dimensions has been shifted out of alignment. Time in Liga’s world goes at a faster rate than time in the true world.

But how does a bear transform into a man or man into bear? First, a few words about Liga’s home village, St. Olafred’s. There are a good many rough, lustful, aggressive cretins such as the biological fathers of Liga’s daughters. The residents of Liga’s village are a crude and bawdy bunch in general. Although the world resembles the European settings of the Grimm tales, the characters speak in a vernacular resembling James Joyce’s lusty Dubliners, where children refer to Father as ‘Da’ and Mother as ‘Mam’, babies are ‘babs’ and one of the pastimes is “fecking”. The town also has pagan-like festivals. In addition to Midsummer Eve/Day, there is an annual ‘Day of the Bear’, in which young men wear bear hoods and furry outfits, soot up their faces, and run after young women—a presumably more harmless and lighthearted version of the liberties that many of the young men avail themselves of on a nearly daily basis. One of the young “bears”, Davit Ramstrong, somehow breaks through the membrane between the worlds, becoming a real bear in Liga’s and a faithful companion and playmate, like a pet dog, to Liga and her then little girls Branza and Urdda.

The safe world in which Liga has raised her daughters is also sterile. Each incursion from the other world further rips the barrier. Although Branza is content to stay in her safe world, Urdda is restless and curious. A few years after Davit runs across the barrier back into his world, a second bear appears, eats the dwarf, and pursues she-bears as male bears are wont to do. Urdda pushes through the barrier and grows accustomed to life in St. Olafred’s. Due to the misalignment of time between the worlds, she ages one year in St. Olafred’s while Liga and Branza age ten in their world.

Eventually Liga and Branza are forcibly pulled back into the world after Urdda seeks help from the person that caused them to travel to it originally. Trying to adjust to the shock of being in this similar yet different world, Branza is woefully unprepared for its harshness and Liga is filled with guilt and regret. She learns that she stayed in that other world far longer than she should have, considering the lives of her children.
“…it seemed to her now that she had had cause for towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. And the joys she had had of them, too, their embraces and laughter—it was all too intense to be endured, this connection with them, which was a miniature of the connection with the forces that drove planet and season—the relentlessness of them, the randomness, the susceptibility to glory, to accident, to disaster. How soft had been her life in that other place, how safe and mild! And here she was, back where terrors could immobilize her, and wonders too; where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.”

Although this novel is a fantasy and a young adult fantasy at that, the emotions and the psychology of humans are as genuine as those of characters in any so called ‘realistic’ novel. Lanagan slowly develops an intensity and power in this novel of accumulated emotional wrinkles and entanglements. Her ability to drop, god-like, into the minds of varied characters and convincingly depict all of them is reminiscent of Tolstoy and her ability to render the emotional turmoil as these wrinkles become even more difficult to unravel resembles George Eliot, especially in the emotionally devastating conclusion. I would advise anyone with a passing thought of reading this novel to disregard the YA label as well as the fantasy label. This is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in many years.

Yes, ‘Tender Morsels’ is a fairy tale full of magic, dwarves, witches, metamorphosed humans/bears, but it describes characters that love, hate and have natural desires like humans in our own true world of good and evil. The complexity of this particular fairy tale world resembles ours and, like our own world, contains the harsh fact that happy endings are not uniformly ‘one size fits all’ for every character.

I am left feeling disturbed and sad. I'm not sure which of these emotions is stronger.

How many times must poor little Liga have her heart broken?! How many times must her very soul be shattered before our eyes?! How many?!

"The only thing he could speak of to me were too great horrors for words, and the only comfort I could offer was understanding them, without him having to tell them." -pg. 302

"Liga's energy existed mainly in her bitterness and anger, so deep in her bones now that she thought she did not feel them anymore." -pg. 393

Tender Morsels takes place in two very different worlds. The real world and Liga Longwood's dream world.
In Liga's dream world all the people that wronged her or judged her are gone. Everyone here is happy, healthy, and peaceful. And why shouldn't they be? This is the place of her heart's desire, is it not? There is no alcohol, money, violence, or anything that would frighten or hurt her and her 2 daughters, Branza and Urdda.
Everything bad was left behind in the real world. The world she escaped, with the help of a "moon-babby", after a horrible deed was committed on her when she was 15.
Liga knows what it's like outside of this world. She doesn't want to return.

Her youngest daughter Urdda, however, knows nothing of the outside world. She was born in this safe place. All she knows of the other world are stories her mother tells her.
This other place fascinates Urdda.
Her hopes of going to the other world are further sparked when she sees a "littlee-man" disappear in the river. She tells herself that next time she sees him, she will follow him, for surely he knows how to navigate both worlds.
Just remember, little Urdda, curiosity killed the cat.

If this dream place were somehow taken from these ladies, would they be able to survive out in the real world? Where neighbors can't be trusted and people don't always have the best intentions, no matter how nice they seem? Or will the cruel ways of this world destroy them?

Tender Morsels is a retelling of Snow White and Rose Red.
Incest, rape, bestiality.
If those 3 words make you queasy this book isn't for you. At all.
I can't believe it is considered a YA book...

Like I said before, this book left me both disturbed and sad.
I was either thinking of ways to scrub my brain clean of certain things I had just read or trying not to cry. One of the main characters in this book, Liga, goes through so much just in the first few chapters that I didn't think she would survive it all. I began to question if I was going to be able to make it through this book. Seeing as how it is... extremely "dark".

I was fully prepared to rate this 3.5 stars until I read a paragraph narrated by wild-child Urdda as she passed by her mother's old cottage and it made me tear up. Even now as I'm remembering it it's bringing tears to my eyes... If the ending didn't damn near break my heart I would be giving this book 5 big ol' stars right now. But, sadly, I'm not. I can only take so much sadness in a book, you know.

My heart is breaking for Liga. She was nothing but an innocent and beautiful child who had to endure nightmares since a very young age.
I truly believe life is not fair. And I have never believed it more.