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Reviewed by Melanie Saward

Well-known in Australia for her young adult fiction and collections of short stories, Margo Lanagan has moved into the world of adult fiction with her new novel Tender Morsels. Liga is a young girl living with her father in a cottage outside of a small, unfriendly village. After her mother dies, her father sexually abuses her and as a result, Liga falls pregnant. Not long after Branza is born, Liga is raped by a gang of village boys and falls pregnant again. After the awful event occurs, Liga is granted passage to her own personal ‘heaven’ by a witch, and there she raises her two lovely daughters in perfect safety and contentment.

But the real world cannot be denied forever, and the borders between Liga’s heaven and reality begin to break down. After living in their perfect world for so long, Liga, Branza and the youngest daughter, Urdda must adapt to life in the cruel reality of the real world.

An adapted version of the Grimm fairytale Snow White and Rose Red, Tender Morsels is a very dark adult fantasy novel. But as dark as it gets, everything is countered with lovely light moments, characters who are vivid and alive, and beautifully crafted prose. You do feel as though your heart is going to break for poor Liga, but by making the reader feel the intense pain of Liga’s life when things are bad, Lanagan has ensured that you will also feel the happy moments just as deeply.

The world that Lanagan has created is incredibly detailed. Readers who aren’t normally taken with the fantasy genre should be able to pick this up and accept the fantastic elements without question. And there are some fantastic fantasy elements: grown men turning into bears, frog spawn magically turning into pearls at the touch of a hand, a perfect world where fear and danger and cruelty do not exist, and where witches will break the barriers between worlds and send people to their own versions of heaven.

The only downside to reading a book with such a beautiful world, is that in loving the characters as though they were real and getting lost in the words, you’ll almost certainly be left wanting more. This is a big book, but it could have easily been bigger. While the ending is lovely and satisfying, there are still questions and there’s still room for the reader to consider what might have happened next in this world. But that’s the magic of what Lanagan has done, creating a story that’s so real that the characters could easily have gone on living beyond the pages of the book.

Be warned: Once you start Tender Morsels, you are going to want to devour every single page; putting it down is going to be a problem.


Tender Morsels
(2008)

by Margo Lanagan
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 9781741147964
376pp AUD$32.95

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