Excellent ... When protagonist Maddie, a 20-something grad student in an unnamed English city, becomes pregnant, she is full of hope. But after the baby comes, something sinister grips her daily life — the feedings and naps, collapsing and uncollapsing the stroller, being simultaneously desperate for company and uncomfortable around others — with a mythical, impending edge.
There’s an immediate psychological tension running through Emily McBride’s debut novel, Queen Mab. Marrying literary drama and folk horror to depict the madness of new motherhood and the transformation that is pregnancy, this dreamy, haunting journey is the must-read arrival of a potent new voice in fiction ... Whether you come for the fairy lore or the boundless drama of life with a new baby, Queen Mab is a gripping debut.
There’s magic—or madness—in McBride’s debut, much as in stories of Queen Mab, but there’s also a visceral and real sense of the characters’ daily lives ... Edgy Victorian fairy tales reshape reality for Madeline, but at times the message can feel a bit heavy-handed ... 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.
A literature scholar starts believing in fairies as a means to cope with her postpartum depression in this artful debut from McBride ... Madeleine’s agony is amplified by her otherwise rational mind as the author seamlessly weaves fantasy into the increasingly suspenseful narrative, which builds to a powerful crescendo. It’s a bracing view into a character’s use of fiction to understand reality.
A young woman’s travels to and through the lands of motherhood and mental illness are chronicled with brutal clarity in McBride’s debut novel ... 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.
