Godmother Night

Jaqe and Laurie meet at a college party, fall in love, and set about the practical business of building a life in a world that has no particular place for them: a runaway from an intolerable family, a woman who plays guitar and works nights. They want a child. What they get, in addition, is the attention of Mother Night, a courteous figure in grey who arrives with her Aunties on motorcycles, whose gift is not one anybody asks for. Mother Night stands godmother to their daughter Kate, and there is nothing malicious in her: she is Death, and death keeps its appointments. Pollack builds the novel out of Godfather Death and other tales, letting the fairy-tale machinery run through an entirely contemporary story of family, illness and a girl growing up with a godmother she cannot introduce to her friends. Kate's adolescence, her anger, and her attempt to refuse the inheritance form the second half. It is written with great warmth and no sentimentality at all about mortality, and it was one of the first fantasy novels to put a lesbian family at its centre and treat that as ordinary.