A Globe & Mail Best New Book of the Summer
A Service95 August Read

“The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry . . . The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.”
—The New Yorker

“[An] excellent debut novel . . . I read Queen Mab with the same uneasy thrill I’d felt staring at my first sonogram. I didn’t want to know whether Maddie’s fixations, that her perfect baby had been stolen by the bad kind of fairies and replaced by a ne’er-do-well changeling, were real or imagined—I wanted that ambivalence, a reminder of all that unease.”
—Sarah Wheeler, The Cut

“A haunting exploration of motherhood, madness and the myths we rely on to make sense of our own reality.”
—Service95

“Intensely pleasurable . . . McBride is such a beautiful writer. The book is so ambitiously intellectual . . . [it] is spellbinding, it just draws you in.”
—Martha Schabas, CBC Commotion

“[Madeleine] descends into a personal hell of post-partum psychosis, given a literary flavour by her studies in Victorian literature . . . The birth scene loses none of its horror for being also very funny . . . Studding her text with many witty allusions to Victorian and modernist literature, McBride leaves the ending hauntingly ambiguous.”
—Suzi Feay, Financial Times

“Timely and thoughtful.”
—Caroline Reilly, Forbes

“McBride’s novel is an urban folktale and an original exploration of postpartum depression and psychosis . . . [A] propulsive reading experience.”
—Rose Bialer, Full Stop

“An elegant, involving fairy story in the truest sense . . . It’s hard to believe this is only [McBride’s] debut novel. Queen Mab touches on many themes—generational trauma, gentrification, the cost of living crisis, and the decline of the humanities—but the focus remains on the ways childbirth and new motherhood change a person, to the point where they may feel like a new person themselves. Like young Maud, you will drink up every drop of this book and cry for more.”
—Joe Hoeffner, BookBrowse

“Marrying literary drama and folk horror to depict the madness of new motherhood, Emily McBride’s debut novel, Queen Mab, is the must-read arrival of a potent new voice.”
—BookPage (starred review)

“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.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Drenched in folklore and psychological insight . . . McBride’s polished language engrosses.”
—Kristen Allen-Vogel, Shelf Awareness

“A bracing view into a character’s use of fiction to understand reality.”
—Publishers Weekly

“I absolutely loved Queen Mab! I ripped through it over the weekend [and] simply couldn’t put it down. It probably helps that it’s a book about a woman named Madeleine who just had a baby (a real ‘book as mirror’ situation), but I haven’t been so compelled by a novel in months. It’s so clever and ethereal and nimble at moving between the realist and the fabulist, and so perfectly captures those psychedelic, feral postpartum days, and the unexpected entry into wildness you experience when you give birth. It’s just so good! I will be singing its praises for the rest of the year.”
—Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest

“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 Evil Genius

“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 they are entirely entranced and carried away.”
—Doireann Ní Chríofa, author of 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