Book Review: Godmother Night

So it's no secret here that I'm a pretty big follower of various lists when it comes to reading; even at the rate I read books some sort of filter is required for selection or I'd end up trying it alphabetically.

As one of my favourite types of lists are award winners (Hugo, World Fantasy, Stoker, etc.), many of these books are available at my local library, but every once in a while I'll have a title sitting on my to read list for years while I attempt to track down a copy.

Case in point: Rachel Pollack's Godmother Night (1996), which has been on my used-bookstore list for over a decade; I've looked for this book in Alberta, Nevada, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, to no avail. Then last month I figured I'd try out my local library's Inter-Library Loan service and my book showed up a few weeks later (sorry for the anticlimactic anecdote).

Godmother Night asks the question (sorry for the mild twenty-year-old spoiler) of how well would the personification of death do as a Godparent. The story follows two young women, and later their daughter through their lives as Mother Night (their world's version of Death) becomes directly involved in a young girl's life.

The story works best as a grown-up fairy tale (and yes, there are some very grown-up scenes in the book), and works as a series of vignettes focusing on two generations of a family and their loves, lives and deaths. A really fascinating book and one I was glad to finally check out!