Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels begins in St. Olafred's, a poor, preindustrial village, with a motherless girl named Liga whose father abuses her. By fifteen she has been made pregnant by him more than once, and after he dies a gang of village boys rapes her. With a baby daughter and another child on the way, Liga tries to end her life, and magic intervenes: she is given a heaven of her own, a gentle copy of her world where no one can hurt her.

There she raises two daughters, fair, obedient Branza and dark, restless Urdda, in a safety that is also a kind of sleep. But the walls of the heaven leak. A dwarf, a "littlee man" in Lanagan's words, slips in and out hunting treasure. A young man named Davit comes through in the shape of a bear and becomes the family's friend, and Liga falls in love with him. When the bear goes back, Urdda follows him out into the real world, where time runs at a different speed from her mother's heaven, and in the end finds a witch powerful enough to bring Liga and Branza through as well. The real world is as cruel to Liga as it ever was. Nor does the ending give her the romance a fairy tale would: Davit, far younger than Liga by then because the worlds have aged unevenly, marries Branza, and Liga's consolations are her daughters and a place among people at last.

Lanagan is retelling the Grimms' "Snow-White and Rose-Red," and she tells it in a dense, knotted village speech of her own invention that Publishers Weekly described as "thick, clotted prose that holds the reader to a slow pace." The opening chapters, with incest and rape, and later suggestions of bestiality, are very hard going, and although Kirkus reviewed it for readers fifteen and up, it suits older readers who can take them. Kirkus said the book "scintillates, titillates and altogether wows." Those who stay with it find a novel about how a person comes back from harm, and about why a world made safe is not enough to live in.