Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
My rating: 3/5 cats
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 cats.
