'Euripides said "better a serpent than a stepmother." For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.''Brave, graceful and absolutely vital' SARAH HALL, author of Helm'Utterly remarkable' CAROLINE BIRD, author of The Air YearWhen a new relationship casts her in the unforeseen role of stepmother to her partner’s two children, Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand this most maligned of female archetypes. Alongside her own journey, she revisits stepmothers in fairytale, film and our culture’s darkest corners of fantasy. Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of maternal experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, STEPMOTHER radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth. Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, STEPMOTHER has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take. 'I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently’ CLARE POLLARD, author of THE MODERN FAIRIES