Tender Morsels by Margo Flanagan (2008)

The title of this YA novel comes from the Grimms’ fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” one of my childhood favorites. As I read, I recognized many elements from that story (the two sisters, the ungrateful dwarf who receives their help, the friendly bear, the treasure, and so on), and I enjoyed seeing how Lanagan uses them here. Tender Morsels is a much darker re-telling or transformation, one that immediately drew me right in—but the tale suffered as it went on.


It’s really too bad. Lanagan has an interesting way with language, just strange enough for a fairy-tale feel but not too fake-archaic, especially when characters like the hedge-witch ("mudwife" in the novel) speak: “‘I weren’t desprit. I were bored. Bored, bored. Bored of coal-scuttles and thin porridge and cat-soup and chilblings and blankets made of paper. A bit of pokelee-thumpelee were something to sparkle up my day.’” Lanagan adds a necessary distance and strangeness with locutions like “littlee-man” for a dwarf. She also writes lively descriptions: “And the marsh—who knew what lay under that sheet of silver lumped with reedy islets, arrowed with the wakes of ducks?” Very nice.

I also liked the set-up, where a 15-year-old girl in terrible circumstances, driven to a desperate choice, is removed by a celestial power to a world like her own, but made over as her heart’s desire: safe, calm, predictable. You want it for her, but it’s also easy to understand how that world isn’t enough, eventually, for one of her daughters, and why it sets up conflict.

How many YA novels by now have concerned themselves with themes of incest, abuse and rape? Even when I was in high school—and next year will be our 30th reunion—it seemed like I couldn’t bring home a new YA book that wasn’t about those topics. When I realized Tender Morsels would be another such, I mentally sighed. As I read, though, I found myself impressed at first by how skillfully Lanagan makes these themes fit with how a fairy-tale heroine traditionally suffers (which can, after all, include threats of incest—see, for example, “Cap o’Rushes,” “All-Kinds-of-Fur,” and the like).

Most regrettably, the novel increasingly loses its grip (starting around p. 142, of 433 pages) as it departs more and more from the underlying fairy tale, and as the focus shifts from the mother Liga to her two daughters. By p. 296, the story seemed at a natural end and I wondered why it would go on—but Tender Morsels continues for another 130 or so. The book’s initial fascinating alchemy loses its magic, dwindling into one long thinly disguised therapy session for abuse survivors. It’s a bit cringeworthy to see how naked the revenge fantasy becomes, and how obviously one character becomes stand-in for a therapist.

As I say, too bad, because it all started so promisingly! We moved out of the magic circle of a storyteller at the hearth, flames flickering and the room deep with shadows, and into a fluorescent-lit church basement support group. Such a shame.