Margo Lanagan

Walking Through Albert — (1998) Young adult. Publisher: Rennie and Aidan know that the house next door is haunted. When Emma moves in, she soon finds out what it's like to live with left-over bits of the past. The more her parents try to restore the house, the more they stir up the ghosts. Rennie and Emma decide to sort things out.

White Time — (2001) Young adult. Publisher: A collection of tales of imaginary worlds and not-quite-ordinary people. From the young girl who finds work experience at the Commonwealth Time Laboratories isn't quite what she expected; to a teenage boy suppressing his feelings for his best friends with surprising results.

White Time

In the collection White Time, Margo Lanagan writes with a clear, distinctive style that doesn’t spoon-feed, but rather challenges the reader in a good way. Her text is multi-layered and works on multiple levels to create interesting speculative fiction stories, some using the tropes of science fiction and some those of fantasy.

White Time features ten stories, and each is unique and different. The eponymous story, "White Time," is the opener for this publication. Lanagan combines a strong sci-fi concept with grounded, complex characters. This piece sets the mood for the rest, as it shows that one of Lanagan's strengths is writing compelling characters and human drama. Another favorite is "The Boy Who Didn't Yearn," which takes place in an urban setting. The protagonist has a particular trait that sets her apart from other people. Again, character is Lanagan's biggest asset in this story as she establishes the personal conflict of the protagonist. The ambiguity of the ending is warranted and justified, giving it an atmosphere of surrealism. The last story I want to draw attention to is "Wealth," which is the most "conventional" story in the collection yet tugs the reader at all the right places despite the alien setting.

What impressed me about White Time is that it’s a short story collection that dares to be different and unique yet at the same time is grounded by relatable characters. Lanagan combines style and technique to deliver an interesting read that's both exciting and literary. —Charles Tan    
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Black Juice — (2004) Young adult. Publisher: As part of a public execution, a young boy forlornly helps to sing his sister down... A servant learns about grace and loyalty from a mistress who would rather dance with Gypsies than sit on her throne... A terrifying encounter with a demonic angel gives a young man the strength he needs to break free of his oppressor... On a bleak and dreary afternoon a gleeful shooting spree leads to tragedy for a desperate clown unable to escape his fate. In each of Margo Lanagan's ten extraordinary stories, human frailty is put to the test by the implacable forces of dark and light, man and beast. black juice offers glimpses into familiar, shadowy worlds that push the boundaries of the spirit and leave the mind haunted with the knowledge that black juice runs through us all.

Red Spikes — (2007) Publisher: MARGO LANAGAN'S ELECTRIFYING stories take place in worlds not quite our own, and yet each one illuminates what it is to be human. They are stories of yearning for more, and learning to live with what you have. Stories that show the imprint love leaves on us all. If you think you don't like short fiction, that a story can't have the depth or impact of a novel, then you haven't read Margo Lanagan. A writer this startling and this original doesn't come along very often. So for anyone who likes to be surprised, touched, unsettled, intrigued, or scared senseless, prepare to be dazzled by what a master storyteller can do in a few short pages.

Tender Morsels — (2008) Young adult. Publisher: 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?

Tender Morsels

I have a long-time interest in adaptations of fairy tales, and so it surprised me that it took me so long to get through Tender Morsels, a strange and dark retelling of "Snow White and Rose Red."

The beginning is promising. We meet Liga, mother of the "Snow White" and "Rose Red" characters, as a traumatized teenager. She is sexually abused by her father and later raped by town boys, and Margo Lanagan handles these sensitive topics well. The actual abuse is never described in detail, so it's not sensationalistic. I had a lot of sympathy for Liga and was rooting for her survival. The prose has moments of exquisite beauty, but I should warn readers that there's a lot of Scottish-style dialect in it, so it may not be every reader's cup of tea. 

Eventually, Liga is whisked away from her painful existence by a lunar entity. This sounds a lot like Robin McKinley's Deerskin on paper, but it's written very differently and doesn't feel like the same story at all. Liga is granted a "heaven," a kinder and gentler world in which to raise her two daughters. Years later, one of the girls finds a way to cross back into the real world, and that's when things really get complicated.

The original fairy tale includes a man transformed into a bear. At first, I really liked Lanagan's take on this aspect of the story. The bears (there are multiple man-bears in the novel) are participants in an initiatory/fertility rite of sorts in which they enact the roles of bears. When they cross into Liga's "heaven," they become actual bears for the duration of their time there.

About two thirds of the way through Tender Morsels, I got bogged down. There is far too much time spent in the POVs of less-than-sympathetic characters, and a bit too much dwelling on the bear-men and their… ahem… affection for she-bears. I've seen reviews of Tender Morsels that blast the rape themes as too disturbing for teen readers, but that aspect doesn't bother me. It's not explicit, and sadly, there are too many kids who have actually experienced these horrors and might find a kindred spirit in Liga. The material about rape never squicked me, only saddened me. The bear-related material, however, hit some of my personal gross-out buttons.

It was at that point that I skipped ahead and read the ending. What I saw was intriguing enough that I went back and read the rest of the book, and yes, it gets better. The unsympathetic characters drop back to minor-character status, and the narrative returns to the characters we've come to care about. It all comes together in an ending that's satisfying, if bittersweet. That said, Tender Morsels has one heck of a sagging middle, and in my opinion, would have been stronger if it had been about 100 pages shorter.

One more thing that sat wrong with me: There's a dark-skinned character in this novel, and he's a rapist. And there doesn't seem to be any reason for his skin color, except maybe to make Urdda (the Rose Red character) look different from Branza (the Snow White character). Maybe it's to explain Urdda's "wildness," too. I hope not, because the association of dark skin and wildness is a long-standing stereotype. I realize that in the original story, Rose Red was more daring than her sister, but I don't see why she couldn't have just been a redhead or brunette and had the same personality. Instead, there's a racial aspect to the story that unsettled me. Urdda herself could be seen as an example of a positive character who is half black, but that still only adds up to two black characters, one of whom is a nasty piece of work. I think I'd have been more comfortable if Lanagan had included other positive nonwhite characters, or if she'd just made all the rapists white. —Kelly Lasiter