Charlotte Kersten

“It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.”

Year published: 2007

Categories: YA, fantasy, retelling (Snow White and Rose Red)

Summary: Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?

My Thoughts: Occasionally, I have a reading experience where I just know that the book is going to stay with me for a very, very long time. This was my experience with Tender Morsels – I haven’t read anything that is so simultaneously beautiful and painful in a long time. It has some of the most masterful prose I’ve read in a long time, as well as a truly unique take on the fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red that explores trauma in a fascinating way.

Liga is the heart of the story to me, and I can barely describe what it meant to me to read about her journey. This starts with her early awakening out of the perpetual endurance of pain and trauma in her newly-created heaven where she loves her babies, keeps them safe, and cautiously interacts with gentle people who pose no threat and hold no maliciousness. It continues with her return to the real world, where she has to grapple with the reality of what has happened to her and the complexity of living in a world that is both good and bad. Liga is at the story’s periphery through much of the middle of the book; I think this is because her heaven numbs to her real emotions of horror at what has happened to her and grief and fear at the loss of Urdda. I was the most engaged with the story when it was focused on her, and I’ll be honest that her story’s ending made me cry harder than possibly any other book ending I’ve read. In short, she starts to develop tremulous feelings for Davit and believes that he is going to ask to marry her, but he instead asks to marry her daughter Branza. She reverts back to self-loathing for her furtive hopes but quickly resigns herself and ends the book in a place of quiet peace. It is really the best example of an exquisitely painful bittersweet ending I’ve ever read. I still think about it all the time.

Liga’s story is one about the time we lose to trauma and the way that dissociation keeps you safe at the same time that it keeps you stuck and unable to engage in life in a real and vital way. What I love about Tender Morsels’ exploration of this topic is how nuanced it is. On one hand, Liga is a wonderful mother to her girls and provides them with an upbringing filled with beauty and safety. At the same time, their world isn’t a real and true one until they leave the heaven. You can hide away from the world and sometimes that’s exactly what you need, but in doing so you are missing out on something vital and real with a capacity to hurt you but just as much of a capacity to be wonderful in a way that is lacking in a static state of existence.

The mother and daughters all have such complex feelings about leaving their heaven – Liga regrets the way she sheltered her daughters and Urdda is remorseful for taking her mom from the place that brought her peace and safety. Branza misses the heaven terribly and can’t stand the brutality of the real world, but thanks to Miss Dance, she starts to understand it better. Sometimes when you protect yourself and people you care about, you bring them a different form of pain at the same time.

While Liga was my favorite character, I also loved the old crone Annie, wise Miss Dance and Urdda and Branza and their respective struggles to adapt to the real world. They have both been raised without shame and bring something radical and new to a world where women usually learn that shame as they grow up.

I understand why Davit’s and Collaby’s perspectives were a part of the story but I can’t help but feel that they contributed much less to the story than the perspectives belonging to Urdda, Liga and Branza. I think I could have entirely done without the part of the story about Bullock and Noer and all their bear-related grief and longing. I think the story might have been even stronger to me if it had been a bit streamlined in this regard.

I also think I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss the way that Urdda unintentionally uses her magic to create shadow creatures that rape Liga’s rapists in turn. Annie seems to think that this equates to justice for Liga, but I was willing to believe that this did not necessarily equate to the book and author intending it to be justice until I read Margo Lanagan’s afterward Q&A. She essentially stated that she chose to have the rapists be raped in turn so that readers would be satisfied with the conclusion to this particular aspect of the story. I’m sure there is a wide variety of feeling on this topic and I respect that others may have different opinions, but retributive rape is hardly my personal idea of restorative justice, and it’s hard for me to look past the author’s sense that it would be satisfying to readers.

My final topic of discussion is that this book is…kind of a lot, with incestual rape and gang rape, miscarriage, and beastiality. Plenty of other reviewers seem to question whether it’s appropriate to label it as YA; I don’t necessarily think that teenage readers are too immature to handle the book’s contents, but I just don’t really know why it is marketed as such instead of being categorized as adult fantasy.