"Elements of literary fiction, fantasy, and psychological thriller interweave seamlessly with Maddie’s fraught backstory, which includes her family, origin, and sealed adoption. McBride’s debut is a sublime, serious depiction of madness and imagination in relation to motherhood."
—Kelly Fojtik, Booklist (starred review)

“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.”
—Emily Bowles, Library Journal

“Peering into the half-light between madness and sanity, motherhood and ancestry, birth and death, Queen Mab investigates the impossible strangeness of knowing ourselves. As gray cats and foxes watch from the hedge, the fairies make their mischief and a woman is transformed. Who are we? Who will we be? A brave and powerful guide, Emily McBride divines unexpected answers from old stories and new questions.”
—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“A novel of great intimacy that exerts real gravitational pull, Queen Mab plunges deep into the specific loneliness of new motherhood and the way it rewrites our world order. From a visceral understanding of the shifts in a woman’s mind as she changes states, it crosses into the animal and fairy worlds and beyond—into questions of origin and the search for wholeness across time and text. Its peculiar beauties and horrors are told through an unclouded lens, never not funny and always tender, and in prose that is alive, charged by its own velocity.”
—Claudia Dey, author of Daughter

“Here is the story of a new mother, whose way of relating to her newborn seems, at first, to be more or less rational, until it begins to morph into something a little mysterious—then possibly dangerous—and ultimately terrifying. Hang on for the ride: Queen Mab is strange and bold. It takes no prisoners. This story gripped me. It enchanted me.”
—Claire Oshetsky, author of Poor Deer

“For readers seeking a book that will shake them, Queen Mab casts its eerie spell slowly, steadily deepening a spiral of misgivings and dread and changelings, until the reader finds themselves entirely entranced and carried away.”
—Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“Queen Mab is a spellbinding account of early motherhood that asks: where do we go
when we see through the myth and how do we make it safely to the other side? Emily McBride writes with both poetic force and clarity, her powerful prose weaving a fairy world of its own.”
—Lana Bastašić, author of Catch the Rabbit

“Emily McBride opened a portal with the strength and eeriness of her vision: I couldn’t walk away from the portal as the journey into the novel became wilder and wilder. Queen Mab is smart, unsettling and tender at the same time.”
—Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know