Author: Karen Dionne
Publisher: GP Putnam's Sons
Pages: 320
The Marsh King’s
Daughter by Karen Dionne is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale by
the same name.
The book is
written in the first person past tense point of view of Helena Pelletier nee
Holbrook. Born in captivity to a mother who was just 17 when she was abducted
by Jacob Holbrook, Helena had not seen another human being apart from her
parents by the time she turned 12 years of age.
Today, Helena is
happily married to Stephen Pelletier, and they, along with their kids,
five-year-old Iris, and baby Mari, live on the estate bequeathed to her by her
father’s parents. The same father that she had helped send to prison.
Her husband knows
nothing about her past, but all that changes when she hears on the news that
Jacob killed two guards and escaped from prison. She knows that his next stop
will be to hunt her down and punish her for putting him away.
The only one who
can protect her family is Helena, for she is the only one who knows how to
fight well. After all, it was he who trained her to be the warrior she is. She
is the only one who knows his methods, how his mind works, and she aims to
catch him and put him back in prison.
Will she succeed
against her father? Or will he outwit her?
The writing is
descriptive, deliciously so, and you imagine yourself on the marsh with the
dangerous Jacob Holbrook lurking around. I enjoyed Helena’s descriptions of the
Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and the life there, the prevailing weather
conditions and the starkness of the environment in which man realises just how
puny he is in the face of nature’s power.
I liked the back
and forth linkages between the past and the present. For instance, Helena tells
us about how Jacob forced her to play tracking games; if she lost, she had to
surrender something that was important to her. This time, what is at stake is
her family.
Returning to
civilisation, Helena comments on her experience, her understanding of
civilisation versus the wilderness, and the media frenzy that her return evokes.
Her father, a
larger-than-life figure who she idolises, dominates her recollections. But these
recollections are tinged with hindsight.
Overall, there is
an air of adventure about life in the marsh that we can’t help but find
appealing. Particularly from the perspective of a child who didn’t truly know
the man she idolised as her father.
I found the
nuggets of information that Helena supplied very interesting. Like the one on
how bears bleed. These nuggets were not unlike the well-researched content
carried by the National Geographic volumes that she grew up learning to read.
Tracking is like
reading, Helena tells us. The signs are words. Connect them into sentences
and they tell a story about an incident in the life of the animal that passed
through.
In the absence of
radio, TV, traffic and other distractions, she has learned to listen for sound.
She is completely at home in the wilderness, and can survive better there than
she can in the midst of civilisation.
The story is
written in the first person point of view of Helena. The main story is
interspersed with excerpts from the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
by the same name, which precede the chapters. The child in the tale is a
beautiful but wild and wicked child by day, and an ugly but sweet and mournful
frog at night.
Similarly, Helena
too is conflicted, resenting her father and loving him too. She is the one who
helped put her father behind bars, yet she idolises him, and continues to do
so, despite knowing the extent of his cruelty. She’s happy her father is free,
even though just like that, the walls of my carefully constructed second life
come tumbling down.
Strangely, she
resents her mother for the situation, for not doing enough to protect her, when
her mother’s plight was far worse than hers.
She knows the
psychology behind why her mother never tried to escape, the ‘learned
helplesseness’ that caused her to obey her captor but she still resents her
mother and thinks that she does not love her.
I can get the fact
that her years away from civilisation, away from other people, has left her unable
to really judge people. By her own admission, she was a girl who didn’t know
we were captives until we were not.
What I don’t
understand is why she didn’t sell the house and move away, why she didn’t
change her first name. Why leave those clues behind for her father to trace?
As
a child, she has no way of knowing that her father is abusive, but surely that
understanding must have come later, some measure of it, after she and her
mother were rescued and she began to make a new life for herself. Surely in the
interest of her family’s safety, she should have fled the state.
It is annoying
when characters behave stupidly after first giving you evidence of their
intelligence.
At one level, I felt
sorry for Helena. Her recollections make it hard for us to figure out whether
we should pity her or admire her.
She describes the
hunting and shooting lessons that her father gives her in detail. It made me
feel more than a little queasy at the thought of a man like that influencing a
child’s mind.
Jacob is a
sadistic and devious man who manipulated the child who adored him. As readers,
we can see that and we feel irritated when Helena does not. We fear that her
refusal to see him as a threat will hurt her and her family.
It is only towards
the end that she admits later that Memories can be tricky, especially those
from childhood and Maybe the man I remember never existed. Maybe the things I
think happen never did.
(I got a free ARC from FirstToRead).
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