Maria Dahvana Headley combines the myths and monsters of Beowulf with the horrors of modern suburbia in The Mere Wife, a stunning and complex novel of love, motherhood, greed, ambition and isolation.
Dana Mills, veteran of an unnamed war, is believed dead after a video of her beheading was released to the media. In reality, she is alive and raising her son, Gren, in an abandoned railroad tunnel carved into a mountain near her hometown. At the base of that mountain, Willa Herot lives in a glass house with her perfect husband and their perfect son, Dylan. When Gren and Dylan become friends, The Mere Wife sets off on a path of calamity: men die, women close ranks, monsters are hunted.
Those familiar with Beowulf will appreciate the cleverness of Headley's ambitious retelling, but The Mere Wife is impressive even when considered apart from the epic. Headley moves expertly between perspectives, with first-person narratives intersected by a chorus of voices from the suburban women who will do anything to protect their own.
"Maybe this has always been a job that women do.... Raising them and protecting them, trying to get them out into the future still living, still loving, trying to defend them from all the... broken world wants." Headley brings that broken world to life with dazzling prose, writing with urgency about love and protection and all of the terrible things people do to one another in the name of both--an urgency as timeless as the classic upon which the novel is based. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm