Review of Margo Lanagan's "Tender Morsels"

(Written September 30, 2012)

If you have read this book, you know it's not easy to write a 'one-fold' review about. It's just too controversial; it's not a 'love or hate' book. It's not black and white. And although based on "Snow White and Rose Red" of brothers Grimm - it's not a pretty story that ends well. It has true human feelings and problems.

I will start with the things I don't like and move on to things I absolutely loved about this volume.

The premise of the story is really not something I take pleasure in reading about: incest is just too creepy to be enjoyed. The world author had created wasn't explained at all, which wasn't bad, but it felt like you're descending the stairs, you think there is one more step, but there isn't - and you get that sinking feeling at the bottom of your stomach. Not bad, just unsettling.

The fact that the narration in first person changed three narrators was confusing and simply unpleasant. I don't know why modern writers feel like they need to come up with a new style or with convoluted ways of telling the story... Is it because they don't want to be like the writers before them? Do they feel they need to prove that they are special?

Well, Lanagan doesn't need to prove she is special. She is. Her language is simply brilliant. The metaphors she uses are so definite, so clear, so precise, that you realize there is no other way to describe things she's describing. Some of them took my breath away, and being a writer myself, I thought "I want to be able to use eloquent language such as this. I want to think this way".

Listen to some of them and see for yourself how beautiful her language is:

"[The moon] lit up everything without discrimination or favor".

"Some man's pint mug sat with drunken precision on a windowsill".

"[She] came home one evening, spilling autumn cold from her skirts and hair..."

"I had drunk a little and fuzzed and furred the edges of that hard blood-black pain dragging through me like I had swallowed a spiked boulder."

"[The child was crying] full and lustily, convinced she would die milkless".

And "... Rosevine clambering over, choked with pale blooms and buds."

I am positively recommending this book, but please don't think it's not dark, disturbing, confusing, at times annoying or that it's an easy read. Not at all. But it's a good piece of literature, that challenges the reader and makes him think. Hard. Although, if you're a bit of a lazy reader, you probably won't get passed the first few chapters.

How many stars?... I really don't know. Maybe 4 for her language and 1,5 for the story...