Lady Macbeth's Daughter (review)

This complement to Shakespeare's Macbeth follows two narrators: Grelach, Macbeth's lady; and Albia, the baby marked for death when her sex and slight deformity incurred her father's rejection. Albia was instead saved by Macbeth's waiting woman, Rhuven, and raised by Rhuven's sisters, who kept the girl's heritage secret from her. As Grelach witnesses and encourages Macbeth's rise and seeks to solidify her position, Albia grows into a beautiful young woman. Sent to help out in the household of the thane Banquo, Albia falls in love with his son, Fleance, and as Macbeth's rule increasingly wreaks disaster upon a disordered nation, she finds herself caught up in the rebellion against him—even upon learning her true identity. Klein's story neatly intersects Shakespeare's, with lines from the play appearing in relevant context as her protagonists' action overlaps that of the play. Her take on Lady Macbeth is an interesting one, involving a return to pre-Shakespearean sources; this is no enamored spouse but a woman with her own separate agenda for power. Albia, the author's own invention, is to some extent a fairly predictable fantasy heroine, beautiful and psychic and skilled in warfare, but her involvement with the tortured affairs of the Scottish king and what that involvement means for her own identity give that portrait some depth. The more Macbeth you know, the more you'll appreciate this, so it would be a particularly enriching adjunct to the play (in fact, study materials are appended), but fantasy fans taken with the literary overtones may also wish to follow Albia as she finds her own way through Scottish tragedy.