THE LAMB

Grimms’ Fairy Tales meets Mommie Dearest in a twisted debut novel about the complex hungers of mothers and daughters.

Margot, also known as “Little One,” lives with her mama in a homestead in the forest. “The people out there, Little One, they will never understand us,” her mother tells her. “We aren’t like them. We’re woven from different cloth.” Margot’s mama takes in “strays,” lost souls who don’t have homes, inviting them in, warming them, plying them with tea and blankets—before roasting them with potatoes or crisping them in butter and rosemary from the garden. Tied to her mother by both fear and a fierce love, Margot learns from the older woman’s hunger until it becomes her own. “Her story had to be mine,” Margot muses about a beautiful stray she encounters on her walk home from school. “I wanted to plant those eyes of hers like the pit of a fruit tree in my stomach.” But Margot slowly realizes that things that seem to satiate her mother’s hunger never quite satisfy her, and her own ache for contact with the outside world leads her to develop bonds with a kindly school bus driver and a classmate named Abbie. The question remains, though, whether these relationships will be able to fill the ache she feels. After all, Margot tells readers she was raised not on breast or bottle, but on blood. One day, Eden, a beautiful stranger, appears in the midst of a snowstorm, changing Margot’s and her mother’s lives forever. The rich, almost unguent prose carries the story through its gruesome developments without, surprisingly, being gratuitous, as it digs deep into the viscera of the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, lovers, and one’s own physical and emotional hungers.

A gruesome yet illuminating coming-of-age story that will keep readers awake night after night.