Literature in Translation Series-The Faerie Devouring

A modern-day fable and mythic bildungsroman, The Faerie Devouring tells the story of a young girl raised by her grandmother (a stalwart matriarch and wicked fairy godmother) following her mother?s death during childbirth. The absent mother haunts the story of this girl whose greatest misfortune is to have been born female.

In this critically-acclaimed coming-of-age story by Quebecois author Catherine Lalonde, and translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, questions of what it means to be born female and grow into a woman are explored. The story is rife with song, myth, phantasmagoria, spells, desire, ferocious poetic telling, wild imagination, and unruly language. Lalonde uses the form of a disenchanted and metaphorical fable to recount what it means to find a life force in one's lineage, even when one is born into "nothing."