Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

 I feel like I've read some weird shit before. That it was disturbing and I've read the reviews of other books promising sleepless nights and thinking about the book long after you've finished it. I never have. Never have I read a book with an unwavering sense of nausea settled in my stomach. It worried me. It worries me. There have been literary prophets, those like Ray Bradbury with his marvelous Fahrenheit 451. What if this is a peephole into the future. It really brings it into perspective. What would you do? We can't survive without protein. I have firsthand experienced this on a very not planned out run of vegetarianism. When I tell you i was sick for days on end, unable to walk straight, nausea, major migraines. This all happens if we don't have meat. So, if all the animals on Earth seized to be edible would you be the eaten or the eater? It's like the one famous case of cannibalism- tell me you know what I'm talking about- when they go up the mountain and end up dying or almost dying I don't remember. But they had to eat each other first. I'm going off on many tangents right now, but it's stuck with me in a way like Verity by Colleen Hoover had, wondering if she really. I don't know you just continue to wonder.

In my opinion, you can definitely tell that this was originally not written in English and that it was in fact translated. Some of the verb tenses hit weird for me, but maybe that's just me. 

I took off a star because of the way that it ended. Now I'm going to mark the rest of my review as a spoiler because I am extremely bad at not spilling the beans.

Spoilers.

I loved the way this book gripped my soul and made me ask myself questions. I didn't like how abrupt his character development changed. He had a complete arc in record time IMO and it was just too quick. So he works on a processing plant, literally the head honcho's right hand man and then all of the sudden he decides that killing humans is wrong, no matter if the meat is called "special meat" or not? He went psycho at his father's wake, freaking out that his sister had what they called "head" or a human that was being bred and used for eventual slaughter for meat in the way that we do to pigs and cows. 

Did he fall in love with Jasmine? I don't know! Did he kill her to save her from his wife's usage? She wanted to use Jasmine for more babies, I know. I know that he didn't want to tell anyone, but to absolutely kill and slaughter her. Like did he EAT her after all of that? Did he go back to his old ways in order to protect himself and his wife? Does he love his wife? Like GOD DAMN IT BAZTERRICA... what HAPPENED. It's a love-hate relationship for me when books do this. It keeps the book engraved in my brain which is probably the point of doing this, but it's just like whoop-de-doo, Jasmine gives birth and then it's over and it kind of also pisses me off. I need to know what happened. 

I thought the main character was okay. Like I said the character arc was too soon and had such an abrupt drop off. I didn't like the wife. I think the emotion could've been better portrayed with their backstory of their son dying. I think that the trauma was very easy to see for the MC, but his wife is just nonexistent until he calls her to help with the birth. And I just- I don' t know. You can tell that most of the people in the book still have basic empathy but then how do they do this to others? How do they kill? Maybe it's selective empathy fueled by the desire to stay alive.

All in all, I recommend this book for older audiences, probably 18+ 

The plot I give 4/5 stars

Character development 3/5

There is little to no spice.