Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?
Publishers Weekly In her extraordinary and often dark first novel, award-winning story writer Lanagan ( Red Spikes ) creates two worlds: the first a preindustrial village that might have sprung from a Brueghel canvas, a place of victims and victimizers; the second a personal heaven granted to Liga Longfield, who has survived her father's molestations and a gang rape but, with one baby and pregnant again, cannot risk any further pain. As she raises her two daughters, placid Branza and fiery Urdda, she discovers that her universe is permeable: a dwarf or "littlee man," in Lanagan's characteristically knotted parlance, slips in and out of her world in search of treasure; and a good-hearted youth also enters, magically transformed into a bear in the process. A less kind man-bear follows, and then a teenage Urdda, avid for a richer life with the "vivid people," figures out how to pass through the border, too. Writing in thick, clotted prose that holds the reader to a slow pace, Lanagan explores the savage and the gentlest sides of human nature, and how they coexist. With suggestions of bestiality and sodomy, the novel demands maturity-but the challenging text will attract only an ambitious audience anyway. Ages 14-up. (Oct.)
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Margo Lanagan

Random House, Incorporated

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Random House AudioBooks

Turtleback Books

Ember

1st trade paperback ed., New York, New York State, 2010

United States, United States of America

February 9, 2010

Reprint, 2010

with cut text due to tight binding inherent from the source

"A readers guide" and "In her own words: a conversation with Margo Lanagan" at end of text.
Accelerated Reader/Renaissance Learning UG 6.1 21
Michael L. Printz Honor for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, 2009.

436, 20 pages ; 21 cm
A young woman who has endured unspeakable cruelties is magically granted a safe haven apart from the real world and allowed to raise her two daughters in this alternate reality, until the barrier between her world and the real one begins to break down
"A readers guide" and "In her own words: a conversation with Margo Lanagan" at end of text
Accelerated Reader/Renaissance Learning UG 6.1
Michael L. Printz Honor for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, 2009

2023-06-28