Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

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 Margo Lanagan’s 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. 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.  Read the rest.