Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast. From girl to witch to woman. From boy to beast to man. From hell to heaven to the real world.
Liga is a young peasant girl of no consequence. Abused by her father (who plies her with potions to induce miscarriages that destroy all evidence of his shame), then raped by callous youths, she has two beautiful babies. One day she is saved by natural magic and, in exchange for her earthly life, her world is changed into her own personal Heaven, given to her by natural magic. Safe in this nurturing world, Liga builds a life of loving domesticity for her daughters, gentle Branza and curious Urdda, who grow up there, protected from all that once harmed Liga: violence, sexual predation and village prejudice. What is this potent place? Is it the idealized world of Liga's imagination, a shared unconscious, or the realm of myth and magic?
But back in the real world, hedge-witch Muddy Annie, begged by a desperate, debt-ridden friend, tries sending him to his own Heaven. Her botched attempt puts him instead into the world of Liga and her daughters, and gives him on arrival the power to turn wildflowers to coins, frog-eggs to pearls, tiny birds to precious stones and to pass back into the real world with the wealth he gathers. But his numerous journeys create perforations in the skin between the real world and the magic world.
Although these generally have no effect, on Bear Day every spring the fur-costumed Bears running the ritual chase through the village sometimes tumble through, transformed from lusty young men into real, wild bears in Liga's Heaven.
How far can you take your fantasies before they grow dangerous? How fully can you protect your children, and how completely should you? Built on a mythic scaffolding, Tender Morsels asks timeless questions about what it is to be human, and explores the evil and sweetness in the world and reveals the essential magic of learning to live with both.
A long-awaited novel from an author acclaimed for the fearless range of her imagination, the emotional intensity of her stories, and the virtuosity of her writing.
