There is a changeling in this story--but who?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and Modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine's ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom's elation and her own joy at bringing new life to the world.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh and worth every moment of difficult labor. But after just a few nights, something seems amiss, changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn't paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Meanwhile, the world around them continues in its humdrum ease. Tom works toward a promotion, urging Madeleine to connect with other moms and keep in touch with her colleagues. Her parents travel from abroad to meet the baby, but Madeleine is unnerved by her father's new obsession with genealogy and DNA tests. Interrupted by visions, panicked at her lack of maternal feelings, shut out from her old life, she frantically searches for answers. But the old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed. And fairies do more than kidnap babies.
A riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered, Emily McBride's Queen Mab asks us to reconsider what is real and how we might see a truer picture of ourselves through the darkness.
About the Author :
Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut novel.
Review :
A Globe & Mail Best New Book of the Summer
"A stark portrait of maternal depression and psychosis is unflinchingly presented; McBride pulls no punches in her portrait of a woman desperately trying to use the research tools and familiar stories she knows to make sense of the unrelenting psychological horror of a hallucinatory bout with postpartum mental illness . . . A harrowing tale of mothering and myth."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A bracing view into a character's use of fiction to understand reality."
--Publisher's Weekly
"McBride establishes herself as someone ready to write (and be read) alongside authors of Helen Oyeyemi's skill with this powerful exploration of the poetics and politics of motherhood. She ably and elegantly blends mythology, motherhood, and academia, with the grace of Lily King, the eye for satire in Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers, and some of Oyeyemi's potent interweaving of murky, deep stories in women's bodies and lives."
--Emily Bowles, Library Journal
"Peering into the half-light between madness and sanity, motherhood and ancestry, birth and death, Queen Mab investigates the impossible strangeness of knowing ourselves. As gray cats and foxes watch from the hedge, the fairies make their mischief and a woman is transformed. Who are we? Who will we be? A brave and powerful guide, Emily McBride divines unexpected answers from old stories and new questions."
--Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
"A novel of great intimacy that exerts real gravitational pull, Queen Mab plunges deep into the specific loneliness of new motherhood and the way it rewrites our world order. From a visceral understanding of the shifts in a woman's mind as she changes states, it crosses into the animal and fairy worlds and beyond--into questions of origin and the search for wholeness across time and text. Its peculiar beauties and horrors are told through an unclouded lens, never not funny and always tender, and in prose that is alive, charged by its own velocity."
--Claudia Dey, author of Daughter
"Here is the story of a new mother, whose way of relating to her newborn seems, at first, to be more or less rational, until it begins to morph into something a little mysterious--then possibly dangerous--and ultimately terrifying. Hang on for the ride: Queen Mab is strange and bold. It takes no prisoners. This story gripped me. It enchanted me."
--Claire Oshetsky, author of Poor Deer
"For readers seeking a book that will shake them, Queen Mab casts its eerie spell slowly, steadily deepening a spiral of misgivings and dread and changelings, until the reader finds themselves entirely entranced and carried away."
--Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat
"Queen Mab is a spellbinding account of early motherhood that asks: where do we go
when we see through the myth and how do we make it safely to the other side? Emily McBride writes with both poetic force and clarity, her powerful prose weaving a fairy world of its own."
--Lana Bastasic, author of Catch the Rabbit
"Emily McBride opened a portal with the strength and eeriness of her vision: I couldn't walk away from the portal as the journey into the novel became wilder and wilder. Queen Mab is smart, unsettling and tender at the same time."
--Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know
