We expect so much from mothers. Even today, it can still be shocking to encounter a literary portrait of a woman who refuses to suppress her own appetites in favor of nurturing her child. Two authors fearlessly take on this taboo in new fairy-tale-inspired novels about ravenous, needy mothers with unusual hungers and their daughters who are trying to survive them.
The Lamb
By Lucy Rose
THE LAMB (Harper, 328 pp., $27.99), the debut novel from the filmmaker Lucy Rose, makes maternal hunger literal, opening with a sentence no reader is likely to forget: “On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.”
Our narrator is young Margot, and her beloved Mama is a cannibal. With a child’s unflappability, Margot describes how the two of them live alone in a small house deep in the Cumbrian fells, an area where hikers routinely disappear. To Mama, such wanderers are “strays,” whom she lures into her home, drugs, seduces, butchers and consumes. Sharing the meat with her daughter, she explains matter-of-factly: “I was born this way.” Mama teaches Margot to see the devouring of strays as an inevitable and even loving act.
Her horrific habits contrast with a more human and recognizable longing — Mama is lonely. (A Papa once shared their home, but he’s long gone.) Though her preferred diet demands isolation, she still longs for company, and thus takes occasional lovers. When Margot is 11, a woman named Eden knocks on the door, and everything changes. Eden quickly becomes an eager partner in Mama’s alternative lifestyle, cooking up human remains in flaky pastries and other dishes that Rose describes in disturbingly toothsome detail. For the first time, Margot finds herself facing a rival for her mother’s love, even as she begins to question the grisly credos on which she’s been raised.
What makes this twist on “Hansel and Gretel” particularly unsettling is the twilight world it occupies between the “safe” remove of folk tale and the clinical glare of realism. Rose’s incantatory prose eases us into Margot’s skewed perspective as skillfully as Mama coaxes strays into her home. In the heightened language of fairy tales, Margot depicts herself as Mama’s apprentice. Yet when she leaves Mama’s charnel house, she rides the bus to a modern-day school and attracts the attention of the sympathetic driver, who sees her as we should see her — as Mama’s victim.
Rose’s parable gradually winds toward a conclusion as hard to shake as its opening. While the title dares us to read “The Lamb” as a Christ allegory, this dark, gorgeous concoction is layered with insights into the insidious perpetuation of family violence. As Margot grows up and learns to empathize with people beyond her hideous homestead, she grasps the very human disappointments at the root of her mother’s cruelty. She can’t forgive her monstrous parent, and neither can we, but that doesn’t stop us from hearing Mama’s lament: “I’ve never understood why mamas are expected to be perfect. … Men are forever thought of as boys. But girls? Once we’re mamas or once we’re ripe, we can never be girls again.”
Black Woods, Blue Sky
By Eowyn Ivey
BLACK WOODS, BLUE SKY (Random House, 306 pp., $29), by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, features another mother who resents the expectation of perfection. A young single mom struggling to get by in rural Alaska, Birdie loves her 6-year-old daughter, Emaleen, but that doesn’t make parenthood come easy. “Motherhood had failed to transform her,” Ivey writes. “She was the same person she’d always been, but now there was this tiny child, and it was as if one had to be sacrificed for the sake of the other.”
She tries her best with Emaleen, but Birdie has always had a “craving,” an insatiable hunger for the freedom of wild places. She knows she shouldn’t leave her daughter alone but she does sometimes anyway, whether to grab a more lucrative night bartending shift or to sneak a blissful hour in the woods by herself.
Then Birdie falls in love with Arthur Neilsen, a mountainside hermit with a scarred face. He may not be a conventional partner, but their physical chemistry is strong and Emaleen also adores the quiet man. Everyone else, though, has misgivings about their relationship, especially Arthur’s adoptive father, a retired lawman who knows the whole truth about why Arthur lives most of the year in seclusion. But Birdie longs to experience the remote places Arthur has described to her, so she packs up her daughter and moves them into his rugged cabin, accessible only by plane.
Ivey is an enthralling storyteller who paints the Alaskan landscape and its inhabitants with equal affection. Her empathy for her characters doesn’t falter even as we realize that Birdie is in over her head and putting her daughter in harm’s way. The danger that menaces them is both natural and supernatural, with its roots in fairy tales (in an author’s note, Ivey cites “Beauty and the Beast” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” as inspirations). Like many before her who have sought the freedom of nature while underestimating its hazards, Birdie learns that “the wilderness had the pull of a dangerous eddy.” And Arthur, whom she loves for his hunger that echoes her own, will reveal himself to be inseparable from that peril.
One could quibble with Ivey’s sometimes shaky integration of realistic and supernatural elements, and one vital transition is abrupt. Still, the author weaves the tapestry of her story so deftly, presenting the natural world with respect instead of romanticization, that later developments hit us with devastating force.
The final word of this dark fable belongs to an adult Emaleen, who sees all too clearly how her mother failed her. But she’s still able to find room in her heart for “people like Birdie and Arthur, who tried and tried but never found their footing.” By accepting her mother’s flawed humanity, she finds peace with her own.
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