Godmother Night

Godmother Night begins as a love story. Laurie and Jaqe meet at a dance in college, fall in love and set up a household together, Laurie leaving graduate school to do it. Along the way they meet Mother Night, an older woman with red hair who rides a motorcycle at the head of a crew of younger women, all redheads like her, the Motorcycle Girls. Mother Night helps the couple against the pressures of family and the world around them. Then Jaqe decides she wants to be a mother. A friend finds an anonymous donor, and Jaqe gives birth to a daughter, Kate. Shortly afterward Jaqe dies, and the reader learns who Mother Night really is: Death.

The rest of the novel belongs to Kate. Laurie adopts her, and Death takes on the role of godmother. Kate is a misfit at school, but she moves easily through the ghostly world her godmother shows her. As an adult she becomes a healer. Mother Night gives her a potion that can save patients conventional medicine cannot help, but only those whom Mother Night says are not already doomed. When Kate begins to question those judgments, she has to make a hard choice, with the life of her own lover in the balance.

Pollack moves easily between the everyday world and the world of fairy tale and folklore, setting Death's role as godmother inside modern city life, where the fantastic keeps breaking through. The heart of the book is its relationships, and Publishers Weekly singled out her portrayal of women's intimate relationships with one another, calling her fairy tale plot "resourceful and original." The book is tender, strange and sometimes painful, and readers should know that death comes often in it, to characters they have come to care about. Kirkus called it "tender and disturbing" and "wildly inventive." It suits readers who like fairy tales retold for adults, and anyone looking for fantasy centered on lesbian lives and families.