Tender Morsels

This extraordinary novel should ensure that its author, until recently best known only in her native Australia, takes her rightful place in the front rank of fantasy authors alongside Philip Pullman, Margaret Mahy and Diana Wynne Jones. Ostensibly a re-telling of the Grimm tale ‘Snow White and Rose Red’, it mixes magic and realism, the cruel and the tender, and the erotic with the violent. Not for faint hearts, it starts with a joyful scene of youthful copulation but goes on to describe incest, gang rape and the subsequent long-postponed fearful female revenge, never quite specified but certainly sounding very painful. Set in some indeterminate time in the past in rural surroundings, it is written in heightened, at time poetic prose and has already been listed as one of the prestigious Printz Honor novels in America chosen for excellence in Young Adult literature. Its main characters live partly in an imagined world, where everything is nice but a little dull, or else in the real world which they had escaped from after much suffering and pain. Others in their village also find themselves taking occasional trips to this different universe, sometimes in the shape of bears. To understand why bears, you will have to read this enthralling, at times unsettling but always richly imagined novel and try to persuade as many dreamy, intelligent, literary teenagers as you know to do the same. Neither you, nor they, should be disappointed.