Reviews with content warning for Animal death - The Mere Wife

“Listen,” the voice whispers. “In some countries, you kill a monster when it’s born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it’s just alone.”

TITLE—The Mere Wife

AUTHOR—Maria Dahvana Headley

PUBLISHED—2018

GENRE—literary fiction; retelling

SETTING—the community of Herot Hall and the mountain beside it

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—war, soldiers, vets, motherhood, self identity, isolation, outcasts, heroism, self mythology

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—This book was SO gorgeously written. I seriously can’t get over how beautiful the writing was.

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—POV chapters from the “creatures” and the dogs were really cool. I like that they were given “voices” in this story.

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(⭐️?) this book is extremely heavy (obviously) on the theme of Motherhood and like… idk. I have trouble understanding a lot of the discussion around this theme and sometimes I feel like women are EQUATED with mothers and like a lot of the times a woman is not considered a woman UNTIL she’s a mother and that to me is obviously problematic—unless you’re talking about “mothering” in the way that Robin Wall Kimmerer does in Braiding Sweetgrass, but I do not think that that is what was happening in this book—and also just very exclusionary. But overall I think that there was a lot of really great philosophical discussions via the characters and their choices in this book and I’d have to read it again for sure to really grasp all of it but, it seems really solid.

“So, are you crazy?” she asks, without fanfare. “*I* am. I see things… Why am I alive, anyway? Is that what you’re thinking? That’s what I’m thinking.”

Since this book is a retelling, I would absolutely recommend reading Headley’s translation of Beowulf BEFORE reading this novel. You will get SO much more out of it, I promise.

The writing style was definitely my favorite thing about this book but a lot of the philosophical discussions and the characters themselves were really compelling as well. As a retelling I think the author did an incredible job of taking control of the story and making it her own while also reflecting a lot of the feel and themes of the original.

I thought making “Grendel’s” mother an ex-soldier and Ben Woolf/(Beowulf) a cop who is also a vet was definitely the best way to treat the themes of war in the original story from a modern lens. Headley did a really good job with this. I would love to read this in an academic setting though because I feel like there is SO much to unpack in this novel that I would need like a groupthink sort of session to process it all.

“…but there are billions of years out there, and who knows what’s happened in them. If something’s happened once, we could all find love again. If something’s happened once, none of us are done for. None of us are the last of us. The story is all of the voices, not just the voice of the one who tells it at the end.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

TW // PTSD, violent war imagery, implications of rape, abortion, racism, emotional abuse, toxic relationships, infidelity, guns, gun violence

Further Reading—

Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
“Grendel and His Mother”, in The Source of Self Regard, by Toni Morrison
the Norton Critical Edition of Beowulf, trans. by Seamus Heaney
Grendel, by John Gardner

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