Queen Mab

Madeleine is twenty-three, newly married, and a promising graduate student in Victorian and Modernist literature. She is young to be a mother, and even her own mother worries about the timing. Her doubts are brushed aside by her husband Tom's delight and by her own joy at bringing a child into the world. Then Maud is born, perfect and worth every hour of a difficult labor. Within a few nights, though, something seems to have changed. The baby cries without stopping, her hunger is endless, and her eyes carry a glint of ancient mischief. Madeleine begins to wonder whether Maud is a fairy child, swapped in while she wasn't looking, and whether the real Maud is dancing in the half-light with the fairies and the foxes, hidden behind the hedge by the gray cat. Everyday life carries on around her. Tom works toward a promotion and urges her to make friends with other mothers and stay in touch with her colleagues. Her parents fly in from abroad to meet the baby, and Madeleine is unsettled by her father's new fixation on genealogy and DNA tests. Beset by visions, alarmed by her lack of maternal feeling, and cut off from her old life, she searches desperately for answers. The old stories, however, end in sorrow and bloodshed, and fairies do more than steal babies. Queen Mab is a portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families that hold us in place. It asks readers to reconsider what is real, and what a truer picture of ourselves might look like when seen through the dark.