Happily

With milk teeth, bread crumbs, pebbles, and tears, Mark illumines the outermost expanses of motherhood's chaos, cruelty, and love. She confidently wields the weird logic of the fairy tale-bewitched, I didn't even try to distinguish the real from the unreal. I just wanted to follow this thrillingly distinctive book wherever it went. -Sarah Manguso Who is this stunning sorceress of love and lightness and language wrapped around the heavy? We are so lucky to have her to consider the world with us. This book is going onto my fairy tale class syllabus pronto but beyond the tales it's also such a powerful investigation of motherhood, of personhood, chock full of truly amazing associations. A keeper. -Aimee Bender Sabrina Orah Mark's lapidary sentences hitched together can make us understand fairytales better but not by any means so obvious as explaining them. These are fairytales that are essays on fairytales but also incantations, confessions, news analysis, personal history, and reminders that fairytales are dainty things capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting of the contents of our imaginations and the aches of our hearts. Which is my longwinded way of saying: Amazing! Gorgeous! Read this! -Rebecca Solnit In her probing memoir-in-essays, Mark uses fairy tales as framing devices to unpack a range of topics including motherhood, marriage, racism, and mortality. . . . Mark's sharp analysis captures the 'cultural resilience' of fairy tales, and her writing hums with lyrical self-reflection. . . . Readers will find this full of insight. -Publishers Weekly