Evidently, Tender Morsels is a modern retelling of Brothers Grimm's fairy tale Rose Red and Snow White: A Grimms Fairy Tale. If I have to look for an analogy among better known fairy tale retellings, Tender Morsels is closer in its audacity to Anne Rice's version of Sleeping Beauty - The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty than to Robin McKinley's Spindle's End. Is Tender Morsels a remarkable work of literature? Yes. Does it cross the boundaries of what is YA appropriate? Yes, again.

Liga has had an awful childhood and young adulthood. In fact so awful, that she is now resolved to end her life and life of her newborn daughter. As she is about to jump off a cliff, she is magically given an opportunity to find safety and peace in her personal heaven - a place created by her own imagination, where she can live without fear, surrounded by kind people. There, years go by, Liga is safe and happy in the paradise of her own making, raising her two daughters - Branza and Urrda. But gradually the border between the real and imagined worlds starts to blur and eventually the three women have to decide if they want to stay in Liga's safe but dull and predictable world or go back to the real world, vibrant and energetic, but ugly and violent at the same time...

My first impression of the book was - I totally understand why Tender Morsels was given Printz. Margo Lanagan can definitely write. Not many authors' writing possesses the intensity and edginess of Lanagan's. And not many can cause readers so much anxiety and make their skin crawl. This book is horrifying!

Also, after thinking about the book for a while, I realized that more than anything, this fairy tale is an exploration of dissociation as a coping mechanism. Liga lives in a world of her own making trying to forget the trauma of her past, and for some time this heaven helps her to pull herself together and raise her children in the safety she has never had. But only after facing the real world and reliving her past horrors is Liga able to truly free herself of her demons.

Tender Morsels is also a remarkable examination of how a mother's fears affect the psyches of her daughters. Liga attempts to shelter Branza and Urrda from the horrors of the real world, but what she achieves is planting the same fears in her older daughter and defiance and impatience to explore the outside world in the younger.

As you can see, I liked the book and story a lot. What I do have a problem with is the classification of this book as YA. Many YA writers nowadays push the boundaries of what is appropriate for children, Lanagan I think takes it a tad too far.

For one, this book is very sexual. It is permeated with sexual themes, and more often than not the sexuality explored is not healthy, it is twisted and perverted. The majority of men portrayed in this book are sexual predators, and women are either easily available "slatterns" or unwilling sexual objects who are forcefully taken advantage of. The first lines of the book are a good indicator of the tone the book takes.

"There are plenty would call her a slut for it. Me, I was just glad she had shown me. Now I could get this embarrassment off me. Now I knew what to do when it stuck out its dim one-eyed head.

She were a revelation, Hotty Annie. I had not known a girl could feel this too. Lucky girls; they can feel it and feel it and nothing need show on the outside; they have to act all hot like Annie did, talk smut and offer herself to the lads, before anyone can tell."

But even more, the book brings up the subjects not every adult can handle. Just in the first chapter, Liga is subjected to repeated incestuous rape, experiences miscarriages and abortions, gives birth to a child and then is gang raped. And it doesn't stop there. Later on Lanagan ventures into sodomy and, I kid you not, bestiality. There is no other way to describe this scene between a girl and a bear (although he is a man in real world but manifests as bear in Liga's heaven):

"He visited once or twice more, and then she did not see him again until the spring. When she met him then, out in the woods alone, he manifested great excitement, and she was so happy to see him that she allowed him to lick and whiffle as he pleased awhile, until he combined a lick and a pawing of her shift in such a way that he got out one of her breasts. Despite her laughing protests and her pushings, he held her body to the tree he had herded her against, and he licked and licked at the rosy nipple as if it were honey licking from a cracked pot, until Branza hardly knew what to think. with the heat and strength of the sensation and the horror of the newness. Other parts of her responded that were quite far from the nipple itself and yet were connected by some cord of sensation like a string through a wooden puppet."

Now, I am an adventurous reader, but even I find it hard to take. I do not think a regular 12-year old will be able to appreciate or even understand this kind of story.

I can not fathom this book could be embraced by the mainstream YA readers. I personally found Tender Morsels a memorable book, the type of read that lingers in the back of your mind for a long time. But can I wholeheartedly recommend it to a teenager or even an adult? I am not sure...