Hello and welcome to another book review! This is actually one of my 5 stars reads from 2024.
As always, before diving into the review itself, let’s see what the book is about:
The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne
Genre: Thriller
The mesmerizing tale of a woman who must risk everything to hunt down the dangerous man who shaped her past and threatens to steal her future: her father.
Helena Pelletier has a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a business that fills her days. But she also 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. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature, and despite her father’s sometimes brutal behavior, she loved him, too…until she learned precisely how savage 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 marsh. The police begin 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.
One of my favorite things to read are thrillers that actually keep me intrigued the whole time I’m reading it, like I could kinda predict what’s gonna happen but nonetheless, I’m on the edge of my seat, anxiously racing to reach the final page. When I stumbled upon this book, I was looking for a thriller that is disturbing and that would keep me hooked from the first page and I’m glad this book delivered!
If you’ve read Room by Emma Donoghue before, this is quite similar, so please be aware of the TW before starting it. The difference is that the narrator in The Marsh King’s Daughter is the daughter after she’s much older and we actually get to see the thing through so many perspectives. What I mean by that is the fact that sometimes when you hear such stories, of course it’s absolutely disgusting and terrible, but for those affected, there are a plethora of emotions, even love sometimes. Like our main character in this story, Helena, was very attached to her father, he was pretty much her role model for all her childhood, so reconciling that with the man she discovers him to be was predictably hard–though sometimes it was appalling how much she idolized him. Like, even as she’s now older, she still loves him, they had a lot of amazing memories together but she also hates him for what he did and would have continued to do if she didn’t act when she did. (not saying much than that)
I truly loved the writing style of Karen Dionne in this, I liked how it switched between telling the story of present day and the past. It was really cleverly done; it gives you each time just enough information to understand what’s going on and to keep you hanging until the next chapter.
Rating: 5 stars
librorum in sempiternum 