Maria Dahvana Headley

Malcolm Mays is very close to the end of his rope. After the collapse of his terrible marriage, after a horrific tragedy, he has spent close to his last dollars on a house in rural Ione, Oregon. His first sight of the house confirms that there’s plenty of work to be done, but also that there’s something good to work with. When he opens the front door to his new home for the first time, he finds a huge pile of mail written to the dead owner of the house from an inmate at the federal show more prison two hundred miles away in Salem. As he explores the house, he receives a letter from the prison himself, delivered, apparently, without the need for a postal worker or any other human agent. The letter is from Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, who tells him that there will be a plate set out for him in the icebox, and flowers beside the bed. It is too long, Dusha says, since he was in that house; he’s been in prison for one hundred and seventeen years for a crime he didn’t commit. His sentence was two lifetimes and a day, and it’s about to come to an end. And then he’ll come home, to the house Malcolm thinks is his own. In the meantime, Dusha says, the house will welcome him.

For the house is magical. When Malcolm goes to the refrigerator, supper is ready for him, complete with wine — cold despite the fact that the electricity hasn’t been hooked up yet. Invisible hands prepare Malcolm’s bed, set out his clothes, draw his bath, wash his dishes, prepare all his meals. And the letters continue to come, instructing Malcolm to prepare things for Dusha’s return. Dusha wants Malcolm to makes things ready for him, to perform a task so horrible that Malcolm quails — except that Dusha promises what he wants most in return.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard have taken the darker aspects of fairy tales and come up with a new tale set in contemporary America, complete with contemporary American problems of automobiles and broken marriages. These horrors that happen every day are combined with the horrors of a supernatural creature that seems to soothe in order to terrify, to provide for all his victim’s needs so long as that victim might be useful. As the story progresses, and as Malcolm toys with the notion of doing as his correspondent asks, the reader’s apprehension mounts.

The authors’ style is simple but beautiful. For example, there’s this passage describing Malcolm’s thought after he burns a patch of mint:

"The smell of crushed mint and smoke, and I remembered for an agonizing moment my old life, a glass of ice, bourbon, mint, sugar, my wife smiling at me, her face lit up with love. A sunset. Trees dark and tall. Fireflies starting to blink on and off around the edge of the yard, her hand in mine."

In addition, the epistolary nature of the story allows the authors to reveal much at the same time they conceal from Malcolm — and the reader — precisely what’s going to happen. As we grow to like and sympathize with Malcolm, our dread increases. Will he lose his house? What does Dusha mean when he says he’s coming home? It’s a tricky way to build suspense, but Headley and Howard pull it off.

This is a beautiful novella, a modern fairy tale that any reader of the French tale “Beauty and the Beast” will recognize, but so different from that story that it is something entirely new. Subterranean Press continues to do us all a tremendous service by publishing novellas by some of the best talent writing today, as this example shows.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/horrible-monday-the-end-of-the-sentence.... show less

So this book. I hate when something starts out so unbelievably amazing and then dissolves into complete mediocrity. The 1/3 of MAGONIA was awesome. I had all these wonderful John Green vibes and I actually cried at one scene. The voice was so intoxicating.

But then...not so much.

As soon as Aza goes up, the amazing voice gets strangled in a complicated world full of rules and history and just strangeness that failed to captivate me. One of the big problems with this book (and others like it) show more is that Aza is thrust into this sky world with a million questions (rightfully so), but guess how many get answered? Not many. And instead of demanding answers, Aza just lets people dismiss her and literally put to work swabbing the deck. It was extremely frustrating. Worst of all though, is that the plot and worldbuilding is so complicated and unique in the sky that Aza's character fades into generic girl in a fantasy novel. Maybe if she hadn't be so dynamic and alive in the first 1/3 of the book, I wouldn't have noticed as much, but she was so I did.

Also the introduction of a love triangle was so anemic as to be pointless. And yet it looks like it might develop more in the sequel. Bleh.

Overall, this would have been one of my favorite books if the last 2/3 of the book (the fantasy) had lived up to the 1/3 (the contemporary). I love fantasy YA, but this just didn't work on that level. I will anxiously await this authors next contemporary offering, but I won't be returning to Magonia. show less

All is well and will be well.
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What a disappointment.

I’m a fan of adaptations. I like taking old and familiar stories and stretching them into new and different shapes. I like expanding on themes and looking at older tales through modern lenses.

So I started The Mere Wife, which can briefly be summed up as “Beowolf in suburbia”, with positive feelings. I was game. I was on board for this train ride.

And initially, The Mere Wife has a lot going for it. Headley’s writing is really show more lovely and wonderful, and the setup – two mothers, both alike in dignity, though one lives in extreme isolation in a mountain and the other is busy setting up a Stepford Wives utopia – is quite compelling. I also quite liked the unexpected switching up of the narrator. Some chapters are narrated by regular characters, but others are voiced by the mountain, or by the collective “we” of Willa’s judgmental neighbors.

But then the cracks begin to show, and the whole thing collapses into pieces.

First and foremost, nearly every action scene is so confusingly written that it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s going on. I was actually rather taken aback the first time, because otherwise Headley is an accomplished writer. But the action scenes are so messy, it’s nuts. I have literally no idea what went down in the last thirty pages. Something with a train? Who even knows?

The second largest failing is The Mere Wife’s reliance on telling, not showing. Large chunks of plot get moved along through speedy narration and generalization, instead of actually allowing the plot to flow along naturally. Dylan and Gren’s relationship, which is the main instigator of the entire plot and therefore one of the central relationships, is one played out entirely through them telling other people about it. Dylan tells his parents about his friend Gren, Gren tells his mother about his friend Dylan. We almost never see the two boys interact, so the big finale when they are finally reunited reads as pretty cheap since we were never emotionally invested in their relationship in the first place.

In short, The Mere Wife is capable of gorgeous, lyrical moments, but in its whole is an utter mess. Beowolf is absolutely a story worth interrogating through a modern lens, but The Mere Wife will not be the one to do it. show less

What is a monster? At different points in The Mere Wife, nearly every character is identified or self-identifies as a monster. About the only monster-fact that holds universally is that it takes one to know one. But if we are all monsters then we are all also not monsters. What then shall we be?

This is a modern reworking of Beowulf. Modern in that it is set in the nominal present, there are guns and trains and mother-in-laws. But in other respects it feels ancient. Headley does a remarkable show more job generating a visceral and muscular form of tale-telling. She moves focus from one protagonist to the next, periodically offering the joint voice of the chorus of mothers (very scary!) or the animated voice of the earth itself and its working as a further alternative. But the focus primarily is on Dana Mills, the former soldier and prisoner-of-war, the one who was executed by the enemy but somehow — it’s never quite clear — survived. Dana is the mother of Gren, progeny of she-knows-not-what event, only that when she came back to herself in the desert, she was both alive and quick with child. Alternately, the focus is on Willa, the mother of Dylan, a self-possessed centre of almost pure desire. Mostly Willa desires more — more wealth, safety, power. And if inconvenient husbands threaten her ascent, well, oopsy.

The action involves a burgeoning friendship between Gren and Dylan that upsets the natural order. But basically everything conspires to bring Dana and Gren into direct conflict with, first, Willa and her first husband, Roger (who is, in reality, her second husband) and then, ten years later, with Willa and her second husband, Ben (who is really her third husband). The outcome may never be fully in doubt. But the lyrical (almost operatic) means by which Headley reaches her end (i.e. everyone’s end) is mesmerizing.

Not at all what I expected but captivating, and yes, a bit haunting, nonetheless.

Gently recommended. show less