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Loading... The Marsh King's Daughter (2017)by Karen Dionne
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Terrific read. I really appreciated how the author deftly addresses the complexity of emotion that Helena would have felt - both love and disgust for her father, both disdain and love for her mother, nostalgia for a childhood that had felt mostly happy at the time until she understood that much of her experience was actually abuse, and confusion by how the non-marsh world operates. I also really appreciated how Helena felt like a real person, with both positive and negative qualities. Sometimes she's hard to like. But I never stopped rooting for her. ( ) This was written from an interesting perspective - rather than about a girl and the story of her abduction - this was the story of the child who was the product of that abduction. Well well-written and loved the characters. The author weaves suspense into this truly sad story of two people being held captive by a narcissist in the back woods of upper Michigan. Recommended for an engaging read. 3.5 stars This was an interesting book, but to be clear up front, I would never describe it as suspenseful, which is how it was marketed. The book alternates between two timelines: current day, when Helena finds out her kidnapper/rapist father has escaped from prison and decides to hunt him down on her own, and back-in-the-day, when she was being raised by said father and didn't realize there was anything strange about her life. Helena was raised in a marsh (obviously...) and the best part about this book were the parts that depicted her family's "back to the land" lifestyle: the hunting, fishing, berry-picking, hand-washing, etc. that went on, and the few "treasures" she had, like 50-year-old National Geographic magazines. Because it was set in my home state of Michigan, there were various references to the state that made me happy. (The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald song, and the Michigan Out of Doors TV show, in particular.) The excerpts from the original story of the Marsh King's daughter by Hans Christian Anderson only served to detract from the actual story, in my opinion. It would have been enough for me to read an author's note explaining the inspiration. As far as content goes, there were a few brief sexual references, but nothing very graphic, and God's name was used in vain a couple of times. I really enjoyed parts of this, but I was expecting some sort of crazy twist at the end since it was classified as suspense, and was quite disappointed to that end.
Fengslende thriller - kan bli sommerens bestselger: Bokanmeldelse: Karen Dionne «Myrkongens datter» Hevn og hat. Farskjærlighet og forakt. Følelser og forvirring. En datters forhold til sin farlige far gjør denne thrilleren til et fengslende og skremmende dypdykk i menneskesinnet. Awards
At last, Helena Pelletier has the life she deserves. A loving husband, two beautiful daughters, a business that fills her days. Then she catches an emergency news announcement and realizes she was a fool to think she could ever leave her worst days behind her. Helena has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. No electricity, no heat, no running water, not a single human beyond the three of them. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature--fishing, tracking, hunting. And despite her father's odd temperament and sometimes brutal behavior, she loved him, too . . . until she learned precisely how savage a person he could be. More than twenty years later, she has buried her past so soundly that even her husband doesn't know the truth. But now her father has killed two guards, escaped from prison, and disappeared into the marshland he knows better than anyone else in the world. The police commence a manhunt, but Helena knows they don't stand a chance. Knows that only one person has the skills to find the survivalist the world calls the Marsh King--because only one person was ever trained by him: his daughter. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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