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In this debut novel, a new mother―a scholar steeped in fairy lore―wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.
There is a changeling in this story―but who is it?
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 desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is 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?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother's house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don't just kidnap babies―they're also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she's been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride's Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
"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." —Library Journal
This information about Queen Mab was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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