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Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses: Tender Is the Flesh (Paperback, 2020, Pushkin Press, Limited) 4 stars

A society where cannibalism has been legalized because of an animal Virus, leaves the butcher …

Review of 'Tender Is the Flesh' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Wtf did I just read?

This definitely kept me turning pages, and I don't want to say it is bad, because it's not. But geez, it is uncomfortable and awkward and you're not gonna like anyone or anything.

It said some interesting things about how we view people (and who we view as people), but they didn't really feel as intense as I was expecting. Maybe this was due to how normalized the situation was from the start, or perhaps due to the fact that we had several groups of people doing this for different reasons and I didn't feel like each was explored enough?

The ending threw me a bit. It wasn't out of nowhere, but it was not the way I quite expected things to go and I feel like I lost what I'd thought of as character development by the way things were settled. Maybe I shouldn't have assumed I was actually getting character development? I'm not sure how I was supposed to feel about that.

The pacing of the second half of the novel (novella? It's not super long) was a bit awkward. There are some time jumps, and things seem to slow down and then suddenly speed up for a few scenes. It's not terrible, but it felt odd coming from the first part, which was about discovering the world.

As a warning, unsurprisingly, this does contain violence against humans. It also includes animal violence, for those that had squared themselves up for the first and were roundhouse kicked by the second from behind.

I'm not going to forget this novel. The sheer audacity of the concept makes sure of that. I'm just not sure if that's a good thing yet.