What do you think?
Queen Mab
In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
305 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 4, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 111 reviews
August 10, 2026
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.
Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.
Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.
What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?
I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....
It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.
I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.
The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.
Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.
Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.
What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?
I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....
It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.
I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.
September 30, 2026
Once there was a sweet baby a few hours old, and that baby had been her own little Maud, unknown and unknowable, but her own. And then she had changed, and this mad, sucking, needing creature with her preternatural understanding and her evil screeching voice was here in her stead.
The baby jerked up, away from the breast, and regarded her with hollow, grey eyes, inhuman eyes.
Queen Mab, the debut novel by Emily McBride, is a wonderfully imaginative and deeply literary portrayal of the experience of motherhood and of post-partum depression.
The novel centres around the figure of Madeleine Brodeur, 23 when she falls pregnant. She is a studying for a doctorate, specialising in the non-human in Victorian literature, and her thoughts are rooted in literary references.
On the eighth day, Madeleine, Maddie, Mads, Queen Mab, Queenie, Madeleine F. Brodeur, twenty-three-year-old promising doctoral student sat upon her hospital bed, holding the infant on her lap, staring into the small face as though searching for something.
"Time passes," she was thinking. The famous middle section of To the Lighthouse, after pages and pages of minutiae about a dinner party, in which suddenly the war sweeps in, and the old times are past, and characters die, three of them (in parenthe-ses, no less). It was one of the texts that had made her want to expand her studies in the non-human. Telling of the catastrophe of humanity through descriptions of fallen plaster and the matriarch's moth-eaten clothes.
Queen Mab, from Romeo and Juliet, is the most affectionate of the nickname given to her by her husband, Tom, the Lancelot to her Lady of Shalott, also originally a literature student, specialising in the modernists and post-modernists, but now with a 'grown-up job'. And a sign of the distancing this creates in their relationship is his increasing non-recognition of the literary references with which they once peppered their communication:
“And ‘love likes a gander,’” I said. Tentative
I thought he wouldn't reply but he murmured, almost absently, "'And ... and adores a goose.'"
I smiled like an idiot. A few days ago he had failed to notice one of my quotes. We had always gone around dropping quotes for each other into conversation; all our shared loves, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf. He had not recognized an obvious one the other day, and when I had jokingly pointed it out, he'd said, "God, I never thought that would happen. It's amazing how it all starts to seem unreal—uni, I mean, talking about books all day." It was a small thing. But I had taken such joy in finding Tom, in finding Lancelot, when we were barely twenty, and in being freed by it, not entrapped or cursed. My world was still a patchwork of other people's words. It had shape as long as I could find a quote for all the pivotal moments. But I didn't want to be alone in the narrative.
This reference, which he does sub-consciously recognise, from Theodore Roethke’s 1954 poem I Knew A Woman.
Madeleine was adopted aged around 1 by a Canadian (half French-Canadian) father and English mother, who she had very much regarded as her real parents. And Madeleine and her mother share a love of fairies - "Fairies had been part of Madeleine’s childhood, her gateway drug to the Victorians".
However an ill-fated attempt to trace her birth mother, both left Madeleine frustrated and created a rift with Carol, and her relationship with her father is made difficult when he contracts a fervour for geneology, Madeleine feeling both left out (its not her blood family) and angry at his suggestions she further pursues her own origins via DNA testing.
Carol, who was unable to have children of her own, had always lamented that she missed out on childbirth and the early months of caring for a baby, and Madeleine is determined to have a natural childbirth - but ends up with a protracted delivery and an emergency caesarian, and after than an infection. The baby, who they named Maud, is also ill in the early days and is in the neo-natal unit, and when mother and baby are re-united a week later, Madeleine is convinced that the baby has somehow changed. This quote follows, in the novel, immediately from the Woolf passage quoted above:
Well, she felt as though time had passed. Woolf squeezed a decade into a few pages; Madeleine's week felt like a decade. Little had happened. Yet everything was changed. Her body. Her dreams. Even the baby looked different.
Everyone said they changed so fast, but it had startled her this morning when they had brought the baby back to her.
The protracted time is hospital means that Tom's 2 weeks of paternity leave are almost over when they finally return home, and left on her own with Maud, who proves to be a fussy and difficult infant, Madeleine becomes increasingly frustrated, depressed and finds it hard to connect with the infant. And seeking the company of other mothers with babies only adds to her sense of existential dread:
Through the steam rising from her teacup, she watched the faces of the mothers around her. Mothers and more mothers, overlapping, overlaid, tired faces, death-pale faces, puffy faces, bodies that drooped and bent, bodies distorted with excess weight or shrunken as though they had lost more than they'd gained. Expressions of tedium or bland impatience, wavering smiles, terribly tender kisses planted on babies' flossy hair. They turned their heads simultaneously, to look at her, and their mouths opened all together, twisted, deformed, their starved lips gaping wide in warning. Their eyes receded; they were only mouths, chanting as one: she had fallen, she was one of them, caught in an age-old enchantment.
Soon her instinctive feeling that the baby returned to her after a week had changed from the infant she saw moments after birth, tips over into a conviction that Maud is not her daughter, but rather a changeling - and she begins to search the literature for stories to support her theories and understand how she can regain her real child. And she becomes convinced that a sinister feral cat, who she and Tom nickname Greymalkin, and a fox in the neighbour's garden, who she calls Reynard, are behind the switch - particularly when she believes she hears them chanting singe verses from Tennyson's poem Maud to the child, calling her to them. Reynard tells her at one point:
Mad Elaine, he said, mankind may build and erase and civilize and drive the old world before him, may diagnose and anaesthetize, may strip the brutality from daily life and some of the pain from childbirth, but the wild remains, just beyond the edges, past the broken gate, in the short and paranoid walk home at night, in the dread of the day the bills must be paid, in the throes of labour and the alienation of the cold hearth of home. In fear.
This is a novel suffused with literary references. As well as those explicitly called out by the characters, A Note on Sources at the end provides almost 70 citations. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, and in a wonderful Oulipan section towards the novel's end, each of the epigraphs is used to form the text of a key chapter.
Most of the references are drawn from 19th and early 20th century literature, but the very first is, fittingly, from Samanta Schweblin's work, as translated by Megan McDowell, as, like Schweblin's novels, Queen Mab cleverly treads the difficult to occupy middle ground between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy) - "the fantastic"
"The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event."
And both Madeleine and the reader are left to ponder whether this is a novel of post-partum psychosis, or a real portrayal of the enchantment of changelings.
A surefire Women's Prize contender - magical, moving and highly recommended.
The baby jerked up, away from the breast, and regarded her with hollow, grey eyes, inhuman eyes.
Queen Mab, the debut novel by Emily McBride, is a wonderfully imaginative and deeply literary portrayal of the experience of motherhood and of post-partum depression.
The novel centres around the figure of Madeleine Brodeur, 23 when she falls pregnant. She is a studying for a doctorate, specialising in the non-human in Victorian literature, and her thoughts are rooted in literary references.
On the eighth day, Madeleine, Maddie, Mads, Queen Mab, Queenie, Madeleine F. Brodeur, twenty-three-year-old promising doctoral student sat upon her hospital bed, holding the infant on her lap, staring into the small face as though searching for something.
"Time passes," she was thinking. The famous middle section of To the Lighthouse, after pages and pages of minutiae about a dinner party, in which suddenly the war sweeps in, and the old times are past, and characters die, three of them (in parenthe-ses, no less). It was one of the texts that had made her want to expand her studies in the non-human. Telling of the catastrophe of humanity through descriptions of fallen plaster and the matriarch's moth-eaten clothes.
Queen Mab, from Romeo and Juliet, is the most affectionate of the nickname given to her by her husband, Tom, the Lancelot to her Lady of Shalott, also originally a literature student, specialising in the modernists and post-modernists, but now with a 'grown-up job'. And a sign of the distancing this creates in their relationship is his increasing non-recognition of the literary references with which they once peppered their communication:
“And ‘love likes a gander,’” I said. Tentative
I thought he wouldn't reply but he murmured, almost absently, "'And ... and adores a goose.'"
I smiled like an idiot. A few days ago he had failed to notice one of my quotes. We had always gone around dropping quotes for each other into conversation; all our shared loves, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf. He had not recognized an obvious one the other day, and when I had jokingly pointed it out, he'd said, "God, I never thought that would happen. It's amazing how it all starts to seem unreal—uni, I mean, talking about books all day." It was a small thing. But I had taken such joy in finding Tom, in finding Lancelot, when we were barely twenty, and in being freed by it, not entrapped or cursed. My world was still a patchwork of other people's words. It had shape as long as I could find a quote for all the pivotal moments. But I didn't want to be alone in the narrative.
This reference, which he does sub-consciously recognise, from Theodore Roethke’s 1954 poem I Knew A Woman.
Madeleine was adopted aged around 1 by a Canadian (half French-Canadian) father and English mother, who she had very much regarded as her real parents. And Madeleine and her mother share a love of fairies - "Fairies had been part of Madeleine’s childhood, her gateway drug to the Victorians".
However an ill-fated attempt to trace her birth mother, both left Madeleine frustrated and created a rift with Carol, and her relationship with her father is made difficult when he contracts a fervour for geneology, Madeleine feeling both left out (its not her blood family) and angry at his suggestions she further pursues her own origins via DNA testing.
Carol, who was unable to have children of her own, had always lamented that she missed out on childbirth and the early months of caring for a baby, and Madeleine is determined to have a natural childbirth - but ends up with a protracted delivery and an emergency caesarian, and after than an infection. The baby, who they named Maud, is also ill in the early days and is in the neo-natal unit, and when mother and baby are re-united a week later, Madeleine is convinced that the baby has somehow changed. This quote follows, in the novel, immediately from the Woolf passage quoted above:
Well, she felt as though time had passed. Woolf squeezed a decade into a few pages; Madeleine's week felt like a decade. Little had happened. Yet everything was changed. Her body. Her dreams. Even the baby looked different.
Everyone said they changed so fast, but it had startled her this morning when they had brought the baby back to her.
The protracted time is hospital means that Tom's 2 weeks of paternity leave are almost over when they finally return home, and left on her own with Maud, who proves to be a fussy and difficult infant, Madeleine becomes increasingly frustrated, depressed and finds it hard to connect with the infant. And seeking the company of other mothers with babies only adds to her sense of existential dread:
Through the steam rising from her teacup, she watched the faces of the mothers around her. Mothers and more mothers, overlapping, overlaid, tired faces, death-pale faces, puffy faces, bodies that drooped and bent, bodies distorted with excess weight or shrunken as though they had lost more than they'd gained. Expressions of tedium or bland impatience, wavering smiles, terribly tender kisses planted on babies' flossy hair. They turned their heads simultaneously, to look at her, and their mouths opened all together, twisted, deformed, their starved lips gaping wide in warning. Their eyes receded; they were only mouths, chanting as one: she had fallen, she was one of them, caught in an age-old enchantment.
Soon her instinctive feeling that the baby returned to her after a week had changed from the infant she saw moments after birth, tips over into a conviction that Maud is not her daughter, but rather a changeling - and she begins to search the literature for stories to support her theories and understand how she can regain her real child. And she becomes convinced that a sinister feral cat, who she and Tom nickname Greymalkin, and a fox in the neighbour's garden, who she calls Reynard, are behind the switch - particularly when she believes she hears them chanting singe verses from Tennyson's poem Maud to the child, calling her to them. Reynard tells her at one point:
Mad Elaine, he said, mankind may build and erase and civilize and drive the old world before him, may diagnose and anaesthetize, may strip the brutality from daily life and some of the pain from childbirth, but the wild remains, just beyond the edges, past the broken gate, in the short and paranoid walk home at night, in the dread of the day the bills must be paid, in the throes of labour and the alienation of the cold hearth of home. In fear.
This is a novel suffused with literary references. As well as those explicitly called out by the characters, A Note on Sources at the end provides almost 70 citations. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, and in a wonderful Oulipan section towards the novel's end, each of the epigraphs is used to form the text of a key chapter.
Most of the references are drawn from 19th and early 20th century literature, but the very first is, fittingly, from Samanta Schweblin's work, as translated by Megan McDowell, as, like Schweblin's novels, Queen Mab cleverly treads the difficult to occupy middle ground between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy) - "the fantastic"
"The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event."
And both Madeleine and the reader are left to ponder whether this is a novel of post-partum psychosis, or a real portrayal of the enchantment of changelings.
A surefire Women's Prize contender - magical, moving and highly recommended.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hell of a debut that looks at a young academic's experience of pregnancy and new motherhood, including post partum psychosis, changeling lore and mythos, and woman trying to keep it together as her world increasingly falls apart. Genuinely surprised a take on post partum psychosis and changelings hadn't been done yet.
September 15, 2026
It has been a long time since I gave a book 1 star.
I disliked the book because I thought it was pretentious throughout with unlikable characters. And 286 pages of it. After 100 pages I went to Goodreads and hoped that the average rating would be 2 stars or something like that which would indicate lots of other people felt like I did and so that would give me reason to abandon the book but the rating was close to a 4! So I kept on, and then more than halfway through and still disliking the book I could not do a ‘DNF’ because I am extremely loathe to do so. Stupid me!
I only picked this book because it was in the Briefly Noted section of the New Yorker and the reviewer didn’t have anything negative to say about it - and I thought the premise was intriguing, so I picked up the book from the library. Here is the reviewer’s synopsis of the book:
• Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelons, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? 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.
Sometimes I cannot understand why I hate a book and the majority of others love it. Oh well. I am going to the reviews and probably will not be surprised that people are going ape-shit over the book., Not me, though!
I wonder if the author meant to convey that the young mother was having a psychotic breakdown. Oddly enough, I was reading this at a time when just last week a famous trial ended with a women accused of killing her 3 young children was neither convicted nor acquitted for doing so (there was a hung journey). The thought at that time, at least amongst some people, was that she had committed that unspeakable act because of post-partum psychosis. I have no strong thoughts about that either way except I could accept that…for why else could she have done such a thing. I just found it coincidental that I was reading this book about a crazy new mother at the time when something similar to it was in the news.
Reviews:
• https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/quee...
• https://objectiveopinions.substack.co...
• includes an interview with the author … https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-...
• https://storystreetwriters.com/review...
I disliked the book because I thought it was pretentious throughout with unlikable characters. And 286 pages of it. After 100 pages I went to Goodreads and hoped that the average rating would be 2 stars or something like that which would indicate lots of other people felt like I did and so that would give me reason to abandon the book but the rating was close to a 4! So I kept on, and then more than halfway through and still disliking the book I could not do a ‘DNF’ because I am extremely loathe to do so. Stupid me!
I only picked this book because it was in the Briefly Noted section of the New Yorker and the reviewer didn’t have anything negative to say about it - and I thought the premise was intriguing, so I picked up the book from the library. Here is the reviewer’s synopsis of the book:
• Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelons, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? 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.
Sometimes I cannot understand why I hate a book and the majority of others love it. Oh well. I am going to the reviews and probably will not be surprised that people are going ape-shit over the book., Not me, though!
I wonder if the author meant to convey that the young mother was having a psychotic breakdown. Oddly enough, I was reading this at a time when just last week a famous trial ended with a women accused of killing her 3 young children was neither convicted nor acquitted for doing so (there was a hung journey). The thought at that time, at least amongst some people, was that she had committed that unspeakable act because of post-partum psychosis. I have no strong thoughts about that either way except I could accept that…for why else could she have done such a thing. I just found it coincidental that I was reading this book about a crazy new mother at the time when something similar to it was in the news.
Reviews:
• https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/quee...
• https://objectiveopinions.substack.co...
• includes an interview with the author … https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-...
• https://storystreetwriters.com/review...
August 29, 2026
Maybe I should read the synopsis before reading a book because I cannot handle another deranged mother story
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A descent-into-madness novel that feels like reading a Victorian text, but with a modern twist.
I’ve read many novels lately about motherhood and madness, but none have been as strong or compelling as this one. Without giving too much away, the postpartum psychosis captured in this book is so real and gritty and raw, that, as a reader, you have no choice but to go along for the ride. You’re inside Madeleine’s head, you’re inside her thoughts (despite the psychosis section switching to third person), and her reality is your reality. Her world makes sense. Until, all of a sudden, things get fragmented, and other dark moments from her family’s past come to light.
Beautifully written, ladened with literature references from Brontë to Yeats to Woolf, this is a powerful debut. Like most good books, it’s about many things: motherhood and madness, sure, but also family lineage. Family stories. Love - chosen or not. Belonging. Gentrification. The wilderness, the wild, the animal in all of us. Fables.
Ultimately, Queen Mab is, in part, about trying to make sense of that which doesn't make sense. And doing so through what we know best: stories. In Madeleine’s case: stories of fairies.
I’ve read many novels lately about motherhood and madness, but none have been as strong or compelling as this one. Without giving too much away, the postpartum psychosis captured in this book is so real and gritty and raw, that, as a reader, you have no choice but to go along for the ride. You’re inside Madeleine’s head, you’re inside her thoughts (despite the psychosis section switching to third person), and her reality is your reality. Her world makes sense. Until, all of a sudden, things get fragmented, and other dark moments from her family’s past come to light.
Beautifully written, ladened with literature references from Brontë to Yeats to Woolf, this is a powerful debut. Like most good books, it’s about many things: motherhood and madness, sure, but also family lineage. Family stories. Love - chosen or not. Belonging. Gentrification. The wilderness, the wild, the animal in all of us. Fables.
Ultimately, Queen Mab is, in part, about trying to make sense of that which doesn't make sense. And doing so through what we know best: stories. In Madeleine’s case: stories of fairies.
September 7, 2026
I was lucky enough to get hold of a paper ARC of this book thanks to Five Leaves bookshop. I feel I should declare that I know the author through some of my favourite GoodReads groups, but I would have been very positive about the book without that connection, even if it may have influenced my decision to pick up the book when it was offered to the book group. I should also add that as a man who has never been a parent and has never studied literature I am probably neither the ideal reader nor the ideal reviewer.
This is a very clever and accomplished debut novel which mixes a compelling and at times horrific modern story of a young academic mother struggling with mental health issues, with many elements from the literature, poetry and folklore of fairy stories. It is full of quotes, references and allusions, a few of them (mostly the Yeats) familiar to me but many less so or not at all.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because I wouldn't want to spoil or to influence the way others react to or interpret it, but I would definitely recommend it.
This is a very clever and accomplished debut novel which mixes a compelling and at times horrific modern story of a young academic mother struggling with mental health issues, with many elements from the literature, poetry and folklore of fairy stories. It is full of quotes, references and allusions, a few of them (mostly the Yeats) familiar to me but many less so or not at all.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because I wouldn't want to spoil or to influence the way others react to or interpret it, but I would definitely recommend it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 stars)
Queen Mab was such an interesting and unexpected reading experience. This is a very specific type of book, but I really enjoyed what Emily McBride was doing with the story.
At its core, this is a book about motherhood, identity, trauma, and losing yourself in the process. Madeleine is a graduate student studying folklore and fairy tales, and after a traumatic birth and a motherhood experience that doesn’t go the way she imagined, she starts filtering everything through the stories and literature she knows best.
I loved the way the author used folklore and academia to explore Madeleine’s state of mind. The fairy-tale elements aren’t really about magic—they’re about the way Madeleine tries to understand something she can’t easily process.
This reminded me of Country People because of the way the main character views life through literature and folklore. The difference is that Queen Mab takes that idea into a much darker and more unsettling place.
I don’t think this will work for everyone. It’s introspective, literary, and very focused on Madeleine’s internal experience. But if you enjoy dark academia, folklore, and character-driven stories about identity, this is definitely worth checking out.
I listened to the audiobook, and I thought the single narrator worked really well for keeping you close to Madeleine’s perspective.
Thank you to Brilliance Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this advance audiobook.
Queen Mab was such an interesting and unexpected reading experience. This is a very specific type of book, but I really enjoyed what Emily McBride was doing with the story.
At its core, this is a book about motherhood, identity, trauma, and losing yourself in the process. Madeleine is a graduate student studying folklore and fairy tales, and after a traumatic birth and a motherhood experience that doesn’t go the way she imagined, she starts filtering everything through the stories and literature she knows best.
I loved the way the author used folklore and academia to explore Madeleine’s state of mind. The fairy-tale elements aren’t really about magic—they’re about the way Madeleine tries to understand something she can’t easily process.
This reminded me of Country People because of the way the main character views life through literature and folklore. The difference is that Queen Mab takes that idea into a much darker and more unsettling place.
I don’t think this will work for everyone. It’s introspective, literary, and very focused on Madeleine’s internal experience. But if you enjoy dark academia, folklore, and character-driven stories about identity, this is definitely worth checking out.
I listened to the audiobook, and I thought the single narrator worked really well for keeping you close to Madeleine’s perspective.
Thank you to Brilliance Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this advance audiobook.
August 31, 2026
4.25 — really shocked how consumed I was by this considering my track record with new releases as of late. My only complaint is that the dialogue felt quite stilted at times and was a little too in-your-face-exposition for my tastes but this was probably my favourite 2026 release (novel-wise) I’ve read all year!
August 18, 2026
This was such a tiring read for me, not because the story wasn’t interesting, but because I constantly felt like I was trying to figure out what was actually going on instead of simply experiencing the story. The book tries to blend so many different elements at once: supernatural elements, postpartum depression, motherhood, academia, marriage, and the protagonist’s personal life. On paper, that could have been an interesting combination, but in practice, it became overwhelming. I was constantly asking myself: Are the fairies real? Is she an unreliable narrator? Is what she’s telling us actually happening? Instead of being intrigued by those questions, I found myself exhausted by them.
I generally don’t enjoy books that require me to constantly connect the dots or question every single thing on the page. I want to be able to get lost in a story without spending half of my reading time trying to solve it. Here, the ambiguity didn’t create enough excitement for me. It mostly made the book feel complicated and difficult to follow. Interestingly, I really enjoyed the first half. The beginning had a strong atmosphere and made me curious about where the story was going. But around the 50% mark, the novel took a turn that completely changed the reading experience for me, and unfortunately, it never quite recovered. I can appreciate what the author was trying to do, and I think there are some genuinely interesting ideas here. But trying to tell so many different stories and explore so many different themes at once ultimately made the book feel exhausting rather than immersive. It was definitely not what I expected, and unfortunately, not in a way that worked for me.
I generally don’t enjoy books that require me to constantly connect the dots or question every single thing on the page. I want to be able to get lost in a story without spending half of my reading time trying to solve it. Here, the ambiguity didn’t create enough excitement for me. It mostly made the book feel complicated and difficult to follow. Interestingly, I really enjoyed the first half. The beginning had a strong atmosphere and made me curious about where the story was going. But around the 50% mark, the novel took a turn that completely changed the reading experience for me, and unfortunately, it never quite recovered. I can appreciate what the author was trying to do, and I think there are some genuinely interesting ideas here. But trying to tell so many different stories and explore so many different themes at once ultimately made the book feel exhausting rather than immersive. It was definitely not what I expected, and unfortunately, not in a way that worked for me.
Read
August 18, 2026Are you sure it's a debut novel? Because it does stand out in how it's written. While it's probably not my favourite read of the year, it is an interesting, immersive fever dream of a book, in almost a stream of consciousness kind of way, and, as pointed out in other reviews here, this is definitely one of the new authors to follow.
Thank you for the reading experience, Emily McBride!
Thank you for the reading experience, Emily McBride!
August 30, 2026
Actual 3.75. A hugely impressive debut! A story around postpartum psychosis and changelings that made me feel VERY intrigued and VERYY unsettled. Not what I expected, and so glad I read it! I’d be keen to pick up another book this author. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. 🎧
August 11, 2026
the more i sit on this the more i love. just masterful craftsmanship from emily mcbride and this is her debut ? oh wow. it’s easy to say this is a book about postpartum psychosis and depression but that feels like flat way to describe the magic in these pages. using fabled and victorian literature, emily weaves a really good descent into the difficulties of motherhood with a character that one loves and feels great empathy for. it’s not all doom and darkness as madeline uses literature to make sense of what doesn’t make sense in her new world after a traumatic birth and lack of support, it’s full hope and empathy. poetry ! fairies ! academia and a baby make maud with no e make for a really great winter read and the best surprise of the year. what a Voice. Stunning. there have been many books about mothers in crisis - this is the best and most creative i’ve read.
August 11, 2026
First of all this is a heck of a debut! As a mother who as gone through PPD twice this book hit a little too close to home. From the opening chapters Mab had my attention, I knew what she was feeling as she navigated her career and later the birth and motherhood. Motherhood is labeled as "a woman's greatest accomplishment" but Madeline (Mab) is doubtful and rightly so as it is not for everyone. It is one of the most stressful experiences a woman can have and for some, like Mab, it can be downright dangerous. The book delivers all of that with unflinching honesty. Sometimes, I had to take a break before I could read it any further.
Reading this book was a visceral experience and I am glad to have done it.
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sending and eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Reading this book was a visceral experience and I am glad to have done it.
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sending and eARC in exchange for an honest review.
August 15, 2026
this is so underrated and much more accessible than I expected, considering I'm not well versed in victorian literature. you don't need to be, and the author did a good job of explaining any important references. I appreciate when horrific content is beautifully written.
July 28, 2026
A story of post-partum mental breakdown, but this time it’s fairies, foxes, and other spritely beings that have taken her baby and replaced her with a changeling.
Madeline and Tom are young and find themselves pregnant while he’s looking for a real job and she’s a grad student studying literature. Adopted and not knowing her birth-mother (by choice), Madeline wants to experience everything that her mother – Carol, her adoptive mother – never had an opportunity to. With a traumatic birth itself, the first day or so seems to go by without issues, but when the next day comes and Madeline, still in hospital, realizes she left the window open overnight, she fears that the foxes came in and took her baby and replaced it with a changeling.
I appreciated the overall theme of identity and how it’s explored through Madeline’s line – through adoption, her choice to stay with Tom, to experience childbirth (for her mother in a way), and who we as women become after bringing new life into the world. Though yes, it’s been said since the beginning of time that the bond between a mother and child isn’t always instant, and the pressure we as new mothers feel can be tremendous, this story felt way too pretentious and forced than I would have liked.
When we learn of Madeline’s struggle of seeing fairies, her belief that her daughter Maude isn’t really hers, it feels as though the reader is given explanations of why Madeline thinks this, and is validated. I wanted to see more of her mania, her complete and utter struggle, rather than filling the pages with conversations that are trying to be well versed between her and Tom or Angela (her mentor) or even her family and her peers.
As an audiobook, I wanted more in terms of inflection of tone, a change of pace between when Madeline was having delusional thoughts vs just her average day of being sleep deprived, or having a conversation with Tom or her family and friends.
Compared with other recent stories of the decent into madness after giving birth, this did not pack the punch that others have as of late. I appreciated the theme, however the execution fell flat, and the story itself could have been cut down by half and still conveyed the same message.
Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well Brilliance Audio and Netgalley for the advanced reader and listener copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own and my review is left voluntarily.
Madeline and Tom are young and find themselves pregnant while he’s looking for a real job and she’s a grad student studying literature. Adopted and not knowing her birth-mother (by choice), Madeline wants to experience everything that her mother – Carol, her adoptive mother – never had an opportunity to. With a traumatic birth itself, the first day or so seems to go by without issues, but when the next day comes and Madeline, still in hospital, realizes she left the window open overnight, she fears that the foxes came in and took her baby and replaced it with a changeling.
I appreciated the overall theme of identity and how it’s explored through Madeline’s line – through adoption, her choice to stay with Tom, to experience childbirth (for her mother in a way), and who we as women become after bringing new life into the world. Though yes, it’s been said since the beginning of time that the bond between a mother and child isn’t always instant, and the pressure we as new mothers feel can be tremendous, this story felt way too pretentious and forced than I would have liked.
When we learn of Madeline’s struggle of seeing fairies, her belief that her daughter Maude isn’t really hers, it feels as though the reader is given explanations of why Madeline thinks this, and is validated. I wanted to see more of her mania, her complete and utter struggle, rather than filling the pages with conversations that are trying to be well versed between her and Tom or Angela (her mentor) or even her family and her peers.
As an audiobook, I wanted more in terms of inflection of tone, a change of pace between when Madeline was having delusional thoughts vs just her average day of being sleep deprived, or having a conversation with Tom or her family and friends.
Compared with other recent stories of the decent into madness after giving birth, this did not pack the punch that others have as of late. I appreciated the theme, however the execution fell flat, and the story itself could have been cut down by half and still conveyed the same message.
Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well Brilliance Audio and Netgalley for the advanced reader and listener copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own and my review is left voluntarily.
September 3, 2026
absolutely brilliant! first novel i’ve read on post-partum psychosis and i thought it dealt with the topic in such an interesting and empathetic way. the connection to folklore and changelings made so much sense in this context and felt really convincing, especially because of the protagonist madeline’s background in victorian literary studies. the language is full of evocative imagery and beautifully captures madeline’s mental state, so i was able to understand her as a character from the very first page. her story was told with such compassion, it really affected me as a reader and will definitely stay with me!
August 20, 2026
This is a tough book to describe, because it could be summed up as simply as “a book about postpartum psychosis,” yet that concise wording flattens this novel. It is a story about the emotional journey, not the end diagnosis. The emotions are sophisticated; you fall into slowly into crisis with Madeline, even when you think you know better. If anything, the reader’s awareness heightens the empathy. Yet it doesn’t feel like endless suffering. The prose is so gorgeous, with such a subtle air of surrealism and magic. It is just all around a stunning display of craft. I also have to specifically praise to the switch from first to third person after the birth to show the change in Madeline’s sense of self. And Madeline is such a compelling main character, with so much nuance. She is rationally irrational; there is method to her madness. She has very valid concerns about the all-consumingness of motherhood, while twisting it darker. And in the end, she gets the help she needs. So overall I was blown away by this book and highly recommend it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 1, 2026
I loved how creaturely and spooky this book was. I never quite knew if a scene was about to dissolve into some hallucinatory shenanigans. I appreciated how it resisted sentimentality around birthing and babies, and resisted the tidy ending it could have given. The writing often soared, especially in scenes with bodily action like childbirth.
July 30, 2026
This wasn't the faerie story I expected. It was something more unsettling and more real.
The main character had a baby at 23, put her academic ambitions on pause, and slowly lost herself. Her postpartum depression and moments of psychosis were channeled through her faerie folklore studies, blurring the line between what was real and what wasn't. What struck me most was how the author mirrored her busy, fractured thoughts on the page. The writing style itself reflected her state of mind. It was disorienting in the best way.
Beyond the psychological elements, the novel explored the quieter losses that came with motherhood. Friendships that fell away. Identity that shifted. Her relationship with her adoptive family was another layer. She had her hang-ups about being adopted but fiercely chose them as her own. That felt true.
Fans of psychological dread and honest portrayals of motherhood will find a lot here.
Thank you, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley, for my free audio copy for review. All opinions are my own.
The main character had a baby at 23, put her academic ambitions on pause, and slowly lost herself. Her postpartum depression and moments of psychosis were channeled through her faerie folklore studies, blurring the line between what was real and what wasn't. What struck me most was how the author mirrored her busy, fractured thoughts on the page. The writing style itself reflected her state of mind. It was disorienting in the best way.
Beyond the psychological elements, the novel explored the quieter losses that came with motherhood. Friendships that fell away. Identity that shifted. Her relationship with her adoptive family was another layer. She had her hang-ups about being adopted but fiercely chose them as her own. That felt true.
Fans of psychological dread and honest portrayals of motherhood will find a lot here.
Thank you, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley, for my free audio copy for review. All opinions are my own.
August 19, 2026
Thanks to Brilliance Publishing and NetGalley for access to this audiobook. WOW! This book took me completely by surprise. I feel like I have read other books that take place/are narrated by people having a psychotic episode or are having extreme mental health struggles. This book weaves a woman's post-natal psychosis episodes with fairy lore/mythology (almost?) and it makes a very interesting and compelling read. The premise is that Madeline believes that her newborn, Maude, has really been switched with a fairy baby and tries to follow the lore/stories she has been told to get her "real" baby back. It is a story of a mother's devotion but also her struggle to figure out what is wrong with her and as a result, what is wrong with her baby. I would 10/10 recommend!
August 12, 2026
Thank you so much for the proof!
4 stars!
Oooo I loved how postpartum depression was done in this.
Fantastic new way to show how it can go, the lack of seriousness some people take to it and how it can affect people.
A much better thought out review to come soon lol
4 stars!
Oooo I loved how postpartum depression was done in this.
Fantastic new way to show how it can go, the lack of seriousness some people take to it and how it can affect people.
A much better thought out review to come soon lol
September 5, 2026
Wow, this book floored me. One of the best I've read this year certainly. You do spend a lot of time inside the main character's head, but personally that is what I found so compelling. Her descent into madness is in some ways is relatable, in other ways, alienating, but the author writes with such a startling degree of clarity and compassion, that I never felt uninterested in wanting to understand what she was going through. The writing is thorough and clean, and I'm surprised because I usually like more poetic writing, but this was its own kind of beauty. Just wow. I wish there was more from this author, because I think anything she would write would be fascinating.
September 12, 2026
LOVED the first part of this--it was rather what i would like my own writing to read like. from page 1 I understood how molly had become so obsessed. it didn't hit me quite as hard because i'm not really into stories about motherhood (though i AM into stories about fairy changelings). though the switch to third person threw me a bit, i thought it was a really good way to show how madeline felt entirely different post-giving birth and a way to bring some of the depersonalization she was feeling into the writing. i enjoyed the way this was steeped in literature though i didn't get every reference that I should have known. I loved how natural (is this the wrong word?) Madeleine's train of thought was as her psychosis overtook her. it was slow then all at once, built up from folkloric foundations in a way which was fitting for her character and never demonized her.
I was not expecting it to be about a Canadian in England which I really enjoyed (I was imagining all the locations from my time as an American in Ireland....for example the harbor with the ship was, to me, this one bit on the banks of the liffey i came across with a diving bell memorial...). It didn't fully enrapture me but that's ok :) fav of september so far!
(and i thought it was cute that it ended with a dance party like an early 2000s movie.)
I was not expecting it to be about a Canadian in England which I really enjoyed (I was imagining all the locations from my time as an American in Ireland....for example the harbor with the ship was, to me, this one bit on the banks of the liffey i came across with a diving bell memorial...). It didn't fully enrapture me but that's ok :) fav of september so far!
(and i thought it was cute that it ended with a dance party like an early 2000s movie.)
September 10, 2026
This was a heartbreaking read about motherhood, loss, love and sanity. It edges on magical realism in a way that is new, combining it with a 19th/ early 20th century sensibility in the way the story is written and develops.
I have to admit, I got tiny bit bored during the first part of the novel, when the prose drags a bit (but I have not direct experience of motherhood, so other readers may find it more compelling). However, the second part really drew me in and the writing got more interest, darker and lighter at the same time. I was brought to tears in a couple of points.
I truly enjoyed it.
I have to admit, I got tiny bit bored during the first part of the novel, when the prose drags a bit (but I have not direct experience of motherhood, so other readers may find it more compelling). However, the second part really drew me in and the writing got more interest, darker and lighter at the same time. I was brought to tears in a couple of points.
I truly enjoyed it.
September 20, 2026
Die, my love meets Shakespeare meets modern day England
A bit spooky but not a bit scary. I loved the writing in this, and how the style changed as the book went on to match Mab’s mental state. I loved the characters, and how it felt like a mystery and also absurd and also how it was always teetering on the edge of magic.
A) fuck Tom. I guess he was okay in the end though. B) Angela’s character confused me. And I’m not totally sure how it ended. But I loved how this played with post partum depression/madness, and how we fell into it with her.
A bit spooky but not a bit scary. I loved the writing in this, and how the style changed as the book went on to match Mab’s mental state. I loved the characters, and how it felt like a mystery and also absurd and also how it was always teetering on the edge of magic.
A) fuck Tom. I guess he was okay in the end though. B) Angela’s character confused me. And I’m not totally sure how it ended. But I loved how this played with post partum depression/madness, and how we fell into it with her.
August 15, 2026
Emily McBride wants to tell us that there is something deeply cruel about motherhood that still doesn’t get talked about enough: sometimes the person you lose is yourself. The book takes that feeling and turns it into something eerie and strange.
Our eponymous Queen Mab is a young and ambitious graduate studying literature, but life doesn’t always unfold the way we imagine, and she finds herself at a crossroads. The fairy tales become a metaphor for Madeleine’s increasingly fractured state of mind as her birth was traumatic and motherhood wasn't what she expected. As her world starts falling apart, it becomes harder to tell where the stories end and her reality begins and who is changeling, is it her daughter, or is she the one replaced by some faerie? The novel’s exploration of postpartum depression and psychosis through changeling lore is fascinating and I really loved it.
But there is another layer to the book how friendships disappear when suddenly you are in a different place in your life, especially when you are so young, and your identity changes while your friends are staying the same. The person you were before having a child starts to feel almost like someone you used to know. There is something especially powerful in the image of looking in the mirror and realizing that the person staring back at you is someone new. One you didn’t necessarily choose but that replaced the person you once were seemingly without your permission.
That felt like the heart of the book for me because motherhood can be portrayed as beautiful and transformative, but Queen Mab is interested in the much darker side of that transformation.
I also really liked Madeleine’s relationship with her adoptive family, for me it was realistic. Her feelings were complicated and while she loved them, her family problems were lurking in the shadows, feelings about not being enough and how acceptance is key to everything. This added another meaningful layer to the novel’s questions about identity, belonging, and what makes someone a mother or a child.
As i wrote in the beginning Queen Mab is earie and strange and somewhat unsettling, but also deeply human.
Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an eARC.
Our eponymous Queen Mab is a young and ambitious graduate studying literature, but life doesn’t always unfold the way we imagine, and she finds herself at a crossroads. The fairy tales become a metaphor for Madeleine’s increasingly fractured state of mind as her birth was traumatic and motherhood wasn't what she expected. As her world starts falling apart, it becomes harder to tell where the stories end and her reality begins and who is changeling, is it her daughter, or is she the one replaced by some faerie? The novel’s exploration of postpartum depression and psychosis through changeling lore is fascinating and I really loved it.
But there is another layer to the book how friendships disappear when suddenly you are in a different place in your life, especially when you are so young, and your identity changes while your friends are staying the same. The person you were before having a child starts to feel almost like someone you used to know. There is something especially powerful in the image of looking in the mirror and realizing that the person staring back at you is someone new. One you didn’t necessarily choose but that replaced the person you once were seemingly without your permission.
That felt like the heart of the book for me because motherhood can be portrayed as beautiful and transformative, but Queen Mab is interested in the much darker side of that transformation.
I also really liked Madeleine’s relationship with her adoptive family, for me it was realistic. Her feelings were complicated and while she loved them, her family problems were lurking in the shadows, feelings about not being enough and how acceptance is key to everything. This added another meaningful layer to the novel’s questions about identity, belonging, and what makes someone a mother or a child.
As i wrote in the beginning Queen Mab is earie and strange and somewhat unsettling, but also deeply human.
Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an eARC.
September 9, 2026
Heartbreakingly accurate and beautifully written about new motherhood/postpartum. I almost had to quit reading because it was so on point.
4.5stars
4.5stars
August 30, 2026
4.5, rounded up to 5
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