New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is … buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.
For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.
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Maria Dahvana Headley writes with crackling headlong sentences that range among old plots and news observations about a world that earlier today seemed too familiar. Master story teller, brilliant stylist, a writer with this sort of command of language is a delight to read. Here’s a book to call up an old story in the newest possible way.
The Mere Wife is a work of magic. A wild adventure; a celebration of monsters, myths, and the power of mother-love. Imagine a writer so bold, so ambitious, so about it that she challenges Beowulf to arm wrestle. That writer is Maria Dahvana Headley and let me tell you something, she is here to win.
With a sharp eye and a deft flourish, Maria Dahvana Headley reimagines one of our oldest stories to give us a chilling, elemental vision of our latest selves. The Mere Wife is a bold, stunning riptide of a book.
The Mere Wife is an intense, visceral reading experience… a revisioning of Beowulf, and Maria finds the bones, the sharp edges, the bleeding heart of that story, and tells it against a modern context.
The Mere Wife is an astonishing reinterpretation of Beowulf: Beowulf in suburbia ― epic, operatic, and razor-sharp, a story not of a thick-thewed thegn, but of women at war, as wives and warriors, mothers and matriarchs. Their chosen weapons are as likely to be swords as public relations, and they wield both fearlessly. They rule, and they fight.
It’s been many years since I read a translation of the original Beowulf, but it is a bloody, good story that stays with me. It is one of the world’s oldest surviving written tales.
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley is not a retelling of, but rather a reimagining of, Beowulf. In the Mere Wife, a vet of the War on Terror named Dana returns to her newly gentrified home town after surviving incarceration, torture, a staged assassination, and newly delivered of a mysterious pregnancy. Afraid the good people of the world would not accept her boy, Gren, Dana spirits her son away and resides deep in a mountain. Gren, however, is curious and wants to befriend the boy named Dylan who plays piano in the houses at the base of the mountain in which he lives. Dylan’s mom, a picture-perfect “Karen” with the sniping backing of formidable matrons, protects her son as best she can, enlisting the help of the local officer of the law, Ben Woolf.
At its heart, the Mere Wife explores prejudice, PTDS, and gentrification. Expectations are examined, too. It is told with women in mind, with maternal protection and interference brought to the forefront.
The language of the book is sometimes staccato, like a machine gun’s rapid report, forcing the reader to experience the unnerving unreality with the novel’s characters. Word repetition harkens to the earlier text. There are lots of clever, double meaning words. And in the end, the question of who the real monsters are remains open for interpretation.
The Mere Wife is, therefore, a worthwhile reading experience.
dystopian
A modern interpretation of Beowulf.
A mythical unfolding, the language a glittering net. New and ancient both. Deeply satisfying.
Maria Dahvana Headley is a gift, a genius, and an absolute wonder; I would follow her anywhere.
Maria Dahvana Headley translates the excesses of contemporary life into the gloriously mythic. This is not just an old story in new clothes: this is a consciousness-altering mind trip of a book.