A young mother fears that her infant may have been replaced by the fairies in Queen Mab, the literary debut novel by Emily McBride that's drenched in folklore and psychological insight.
Madeleine faces a surprise pregnancy at 23, not long married and in the second year of her doctoral studies in 19th-century literature. Her excitement and the thought of what a good father her husband, Tom, will make push aside her doubts about the timing, and after a terrible labor, Maud is born. Although Maud initially seems perfect, Madeleine begins to suspect there is something wrong. Maud has an uncanny quality. How serious was that nurse who mentioned keeping the windows in the hospital closed lest a baby be taken by foxes?
With smooth prose, McBride inhabits the point of view of a woman whose mental health is deteriorating postpartum. Isolated from her community, alone with the baby while Tom positions himself for a possible promotion, Madeleine struggles to make sense of the disconnection she feels from Maud and latches onto the changeling stories she has encountered in her studies of the nonhuman in literature. McBride's polished language engrosses, even as the potential for horror repels; traditionally, the methods to retrieve the original child and banish the changeling involve committing acts on the changeling that are terrible to contemplate. The first-person narration keeps readers firmly inside Madeleine's increasingly hallucinatory perspective. But even amid delusion, folklore has truths to teach about the surrounding world. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library