The Marsh King's Daughter

This book was magnificent! The detail, the descriptions, the suspense....I couldn't read it quick enough! Only someone who had lived in the wild, which I understand Karen and her husband did when they were young newlyweds, could write with such authority about what it's like. Of course, it's brutal in parts, but then it's dealing with a brutal theme and the wild alone can be brutal. I enjoyed this book so much I could read it again!

Extremely well-written, insightful, and beautifully descriptive—all with a fair amount of suspense. For anyone who has lived in Michigan or travelled in our Upper Peninsula, you’re certain to like this.

An unusual story from the perspective of the character as both a child and mother. This changing view was quite interesting. The shifting story from past to present tense was done particularly well.

This book is certainly believable considering current news and movies.

It is amazing how the kidnapped girl (and her daughter after two years of confinement) adjust to living in a remote area of the Upper Peninsula of MI, with no plumbing or electricity or neighbors for 14 years. The daughter spent her childhood loving her father! he taught her to hunt, live off the land, and how to track in the wilderness. A shocking event causes her to realize life with this man was awful She and her mother need to escape.

The book spends time in her childhood and also when she is a married woman with two daughters. When her father escaped from prison she realized with her tracking ability she is probably the only one who could locate him. This is when the book becomes a page turner.

When I finished the book I realized there is nothing in the UP of MI that would make me want to visit!

I feel like I learned lot about life in the wilderness, adjusting to the remoteness and tracking animals or a human being. I want to rate 5 ***** but hesitate. I wanted the book to offer more information about the father and his abnormality. Perhaps another book is in the offing.

I liked this book and would definitely recommend it. The pace was good, the characters develop but the reason I only gave it 3 stars is that the main character seemed disassociated from all that went on. I like to really get involved with the characters and i found that although i really liked the main character, i couldnt seem to get a handle on her emotions. Reminded me of an english book where you are always observing what is going on, standing on the outside looking in.

Dionne's novel is very well structured and plotted, with unusually good character development. It was a fast and entertaining story. I would have given it a top rating but in the last 50 pages the author goes off on an unnecessary tangent about the Hans Christian Anderson tale that provides the novel's title and she also overwrites the ending "duel" between the protagonist and her psychopathic father. In that final encounter, it would have been more satisfying if the heroine had just dropped the hammer' on the bad guy when she first got the chance. The author should have taken the challenge of making that ending satisfying rather than resorting to the dramatic equivalent of a chase scene.

Great book that transported me to another place and time. I always love a story with a strong female lead character, and Helena fits the bill. I gobbled this book up, thoroughly enjoyed it, thanks Karen!

I was very intrigued by the premise of this book. I'm usually always on board for a good game of cat & mouse and this seemed like the ultimate game...daughter verses father. We are first introduced to Helena when she's grown and the married mom to two little girls. When she hears on the news that the identity of a local prison escapee is her father, her carefully crafted life with her new identity and family explodes. Very quickly she decides she's the only one who is cunning enough to track down and take on her father; after all, he taught her everything she knows about hunting and killing prey.

The narrative alternates between the present game of cat & mouse and Helena's childhood , starting when she was born to a mother who was herself a young teenager. Her mother had been kidnapped by Helena's father, who's known as The Marsh King. There are very long, detailed descriptions of Helena's growing up years in the wilderness with her father being the person she spent the most time with. Very long. Very detailed. While I appreciate the exceptional literary skills of the author in these sections, I found that my mind wandered and many times I found myself skimming through to get back to the present. Another reason I skimmed these past sections, and something I wish I would've known going in was the very graphic and for me disturbing scenes of hunting and killing many animals...I just don't have a desire to read scenes like that and that caused me to skip large portions of the text.  In the end, the back and forth of time frames led to a lack of the much needed suspense I was looking for in a book billed as a thriller. I'm very much in the minority in terms of this book not being for me so I'd urge you to try it for yourself and decide.

Loved it! Read about halfway during an airport wait and subsequent flight and then couldn’t not finish and stayed up late that night. This was a book club selection and we were fortunate to be able to have a conference call with Karen Dionne and hear her insights.