Name: Tender
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9781683969358

Beth Hetland

A psychological thriller about a woman obsessed with her vision for a picture-perfect, curated life.

Tender

tori 👻

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is an extremely unique graphic novel about a woman in pursuit of making her life perfect, or at least look perfect.
Tender deals with heavy content such as self harm, animal cruelty, depression and more. The imagery is something out of this world and it honestly gave me a physical reaction by making my skin crawl. Beautiful art style and amazing angles, the illustrations flow naturally and that brings you closer to the main character, who you can't help but feel a lot for.
I'm quite literally staring at a wall, taking in everything I just read. Great thought provoking graphic novel by Beth Hetland.

Emily

Absolutely check trigger warnings for this book.

I saw myself in the main character and that scares me. So it did what it was supposed to do! I would recommend this to people who like psychological horror and body horror.

Thank you, NetGalley and Fantagraphics Books, for the chance to read and review Tender by Beth Hetland.

Tender is Beth Hetland's debut graphic novel. It follows the story of a woman so consumed with the desire for a perfect life that she slowly has a nervous breakdown and starts eating her own flesh. At least, that's what the blurb says.

 Carolanne (our main character) has a monotonous life, but a life nonetheless. She has a cat, friends, and a job, and while she doesn't have a partner and child, she's doing okay. Lonely and fearful of the world moving on and her without these things, but that's a sort of fear that's been programmed into women. We're supposed to be off the shelf by 25 and there is something wrong with us if we aren't.

Tender is more the story of a woman let down by the support systems around her, who has a nervous breakdown because she's literally had a miscarriage, and her husband goes to therapy himself but doesn't care enough to make her go.

The chapters where her nervous breakdown is complete, where she's literally eating herself were drawn very differently. I loved that Beth used art to show us how Carolanne was doing internally!

Seher Mohsin

Thank you, NetGalley and Fantagraphics Books, for the chance to read and review Tender by Beth Hetland.

Tender is Beth Hetland's debut graphic novel. It follows the story of a woman so consumed with the desire for a perfect life that she slowly has a nervous breakdown and starts eating her own flesh. At least, that's what the blurb says.

 Carolanne (our main character) has a monotonous life, but a life nonetheless. She has a cat, friends, and a job, and while she doesn't have a partner and child, she's doing okay. Lonely and fearful of the world moving on and her without these things, but that's a sort of fear that's been programmed into women. We're supposed to be off the shelf by 25 and there is something wrong with us if we aren't.

Tender is more the story of a woman let down by the support systems around her, who has a nervous breakdown because she's literally had a miscarriage, and her husband goes to therapy himself but doesn't care enough to make her go.

The chapters where her nervous breakdown is complete, where she's literally eating herself were drawn very differently. I loved that Beth used art to show us how Carolanne was doing internally!

Tender

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