TITLE: Tender Morsels
AUTHOR: Margo Langan
STARTED: April 5, 2010
FINISHED: April 14, 2010
PAGES: 436
GENRE: Juvenile
FIRST SENTENCE: There are plenty would call her a slut for it.
SUMMARY: [From Amazon.com
] A traumatized teen mother magically escapes to her own personal heaven in this daring and deeply moving fantasy. The characters, setting, much of the action, and even the very words of the title are taken from the Grimm Brothers' "Snow-White and Rose-Red," a sweet story of contrasting sisters who live deep in the forest and whose innocent hearts are filled with compassion for a lonely bear and an endangered dwarf. In the novel, Liga's daughters—one born of incest, the other of gang rape—first flourish in Liga's safe world. But encounters with magical bears and the crusty dwarf challenge them to see a world beyond their mother's secure dreamscape. Eventually the younger one, Urdda, and subsequently her sister and Liga are drawn back into the real world in which cruelty, hurt, and prejudice abound. But it is also only there that they can experience the range of human emotion, develop deep relationships, and discover who they truly are. The opening chapters vividly portray the emotional experience of a boy's first sexual encounter, mind-numbing abuse by Liga's father, and a violent gang rape. It's heavy fare even for sophisticated readers, but the author hits all the right notes, giving voice to both the joys and terrors that sexual experience can bestow without saying more than readers need to know to be fully with the characters. While the story explores what it means to be human, it is at its heart an incisive exploration of the uses and limitations of dissociation as a coping mechanism. Beautifully written and surprising, this is a novel not to be missed.THOUGHTS: I did not like this book - and the more we talked about it in book club, the more I grew to dislike it. Langan's writing is fine, her visualizations are actually beautiful to read, and the characters have depth and personality, but the plot is horrid. I could not get into the story and, even when did, I didn't want to be there. For me the writing and the imagery could not redeem the plot. I have a hard time understanding why the author had to make Liga's life so difficult. I'm all for characters going through hardship in stories, but it almost felt like Langan did not like her supposed main character. If anything, the sisters were what brought this book to life.
I don't know, maybe I just I didn't get it - but this book felt like an excuse to write a final revenge scene that seemed overplayed and unnecessary.
RATING: 4/10 [An "Okay" Book]
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