A review by evelynkonrad
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

challenging dark sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

There's a lot of interesting stuff to be explored in this world, and the book touches on a lot of it but fails to quite connect the dots into a larger picture. Holes in the premise are left unpatched and while a lot of the details are left vague it may be better that way as when they're explained more fully they don't make sense. I was on board for the first half, but then it fell into the surprisingly common trap of
having the middle aged man protagonist fuck the young and fantastically naïve woman who literally has no voice and is legally his property 
though in this case it at least has a narrative and thematic function (
even if the scene is written as some tender moment for him, in contradiction to the moral framework the book has tried to reconcile where it is okay to eat a certain class of  people but it is still wrong to rape them
), and the latter half deals with the consequences of that. It feels like there are two directions that the author could have gone with the aftermath (
he comes to see her as fully human and faces the dilemma of how to reconcile that with his work and the prevailing morals, ultimately railing against the evil new world, or he forsakes his previous misgivings about treating humans as products and denies any humanity for her, keeping her as sex slave/incubator
) but they didn't commit to either of them so that plotline ends up weak, meaningless, and disappointing.
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