To law enforcement and the world, Jacob Halbrook is a kidnapper and a rapist, but to Helena Pelletier he is simply “father.” In The Marsh King’s Daughter, the new novel by Karen Dionne, the complexity of this familial relationship is examined over the course of time and in doing so, Dionne has written one of the most wholly satisfying thrillers of the year.

When The Marsh King’s Daughter begins, Helena is living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with her husband and two daughters. Their homestead once belonged to her paternal grandparents; however, Helena has never revealed her past to her loving husband. But one day, when her father escapes from prison, Helena must confess to being the infamous offspring of this societal monster. At the risk of alienating her family, Helena knows that she must be the one to hunt down Jacob.

When Helena was a child, Jacob taught her everything he knew about marsh living. The eco-system of the Upper Peninsula is a unique one, and with this knowledge, Helena is confident she can track her father’s movements as he attempts to evade capture.

Alternating chapters between past and present, Dionne documents how Helena came to be where she is. The product of her mother’s rape after being kidnapped as a young teenager, Helena grew up with no contact with the outside world. The marsh was all she knew. While it is hard to imagine, Karen Dionne does an excellent job of getting readers to understand this isolation. To such an extent that it is easy to grasp that this is a compelling case for the notion that if you don’t know any different, you don’t know any better. Helena loves her father and mother and can’t understand why there is tension just under the surface of their interactions. Nor does she understand that Jacob’s moments of violence and sadism are not normal.

Not since Emma Donohue’s Room has an author so skillfully rendered the inner workings of a trauma victim’s mind – except that in The Marsh King’s Daughter, readers gain access no only to the childhood mindset, but also to the damaged psyche of the survivor as she grows to adulthood.

This is a good point to note that The Marsh King’s Daughter contains some heavy subject matter, disturbing moments, and potential triggers – but all of this is handled with grace and sensitivity by the author. Like the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that forms its backbone, The Marsh King’s Daughter never shies away from the ugliness of humanity. By juxtaposing this with the beauty of the natural world, Karen Dionne creates a type of written "weighing scale" – always in balance but never far from complete collapse and catastrophe.

Helena’s hunt through the marsh is like a meditation on her history, her lineage. Flashbacks seamlessly weave in and out of the dramatic action of tracking her father’s escape route. Until eventually, the search transforms into a game of cat and mouse – with neither party knowing which role they are in enacting.

With pitch perfect pacing and emotional heft, The Marsh King’s Daughter will satisfy readers of both domestic suspense and traditional thrillers. Karen Dionne’s authentic depiction of marsh living is both fascinating and enlightening, but it is the examination of the difficult relationships between children and parents that will resonate the longest in reader’s minds.

Great mystery read for lovers of historical fiction. Thank you.

Holy heck, folks!!! This book is PHENOMENAL!!! My favorite part about reading fantastic novels is that by the time you've finished, you feel like you've been taken on an epic journey and The Marsh King's Daughter completely delivered that (and then some)!!! After finishing this book I just sat in stunned silence and reflected on the brilliant writing and carefully crafted storyline!! As story unfolds we are taken between the past and the present which work perfectly and makes the ending that much more powerful!!! And speaking of the ending, this novel continued to surprise me until the very end. I have literally had my kindle in hand at every single possible second until I finished!! The Marsh King's Daughter is a 5+++ star novel is an and absolute MUST READ!! Everyone needs to check out this book, I promise you will be just as blown away as I am!!!

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne
Source: Netgalley
My Rating: 4/5 stars
My Review:

A little backstory . . . . . If you are a Netgalley frequent flyer, you know some books just aren’t available to US readers. When I found this title, I read the synopsis and knew I absolutely wanted to read it. As I went to click “request” I noticed this book was reserved for UK readers alone. Well, damn! But there was hope and let this be a lesson to you, if you keep looking through all the pages and if you get really, really lucky, you’ll find a second version of the book that’s available to US readers!

And so it begins . . . . my review of The Marsh King’s Daughter 😊

From the beginning, this book reads like a memoir more than a work of fiction and that memoir unfolds just as Helena discovers her father, the Marsh King has violently escaped from his maximum-security prison. No one, literally no one in Helena’s life knows she is the daughter of the infamous Marsh King and had he simply died in his cell as he was meant to, Helena would have never had to reveal her secret nor hunt down her father.

As a child, Helena knew only the world her father allowed her to know. She lived with her parents in a small cabin so far off the grid humanity has all but forgotten about them. With no electricity, no plumbing, and certainly no amenities or creature comforts of any kind, Helena learned to live off the land, to survive in places and situations most would never understand. To Helena, her little world was as large and expansive as the known universe and it wasn’t until she was 12 years old that she understood just how evil her father really was. He was cruel on a level rarely seen, and when Helena was finally old enough to understand the extent of her situation, she was also old enough to know she had to change her identity of she had any hope of living a somewhat normal life.

With the authorities out in force looking for her father and her husband now privy to her darkest secret, Helena knows with absolute certainty she is the only one who can track down her father and bring him to the justice he deserves. As Helena begins the slow process of tracking her father, she has time to reminisce about her life with her father and the atrocities he perpetrated upon she and her mother over more than a decade of captivity. The moments Helena relives in her memory are some of the best and the worst of her entire life. As an adult, she now understands the lessons her father taught her, both good and bad are the very lessons that will allow her and no other to find him. When the moment comes, even Helena isn’t sure how she will react, but she’s certain her choices and her decisions won’t be based on the fears of child she once was, but on the wisdom of an adult grown from that fearful child.

The Bottom Line: I’m not entirely sure this book would have been nearly as good if it read as something other than a fictional memoir. Helena’s present is very much shaped by her childhood experiences and she recounts those experiences in a stony coldness as she tracks her father. To be sure, this read isn’t sunny or happy, but a cold recounting and child/woman’s horrifying experiences and her determination to see her nightmares ended and revisited on her own children. Because of the subject matter, I can’t say I enjoyed the book, but I certainly appreciated the message. Ultimately, The Marsh King’s Daughter is a story of survival, determination, and the triumph of the human spirit.

'I was born two years into my mother's captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. If I had known then what I do now, things would have been a lot different. I wouldn't have adored my father.'

The Marsh King's Daughter is the first book I've read by this author and I must say it was a very compelling read. I love it when I get pulled into a book from the very first page like I was with this one. Based on the description and tag lines, I was expecting a bit more of a thriller here. It was more psychological than thriller, although it did have its moments, especially towards the end.

Helena is married with two daughters and she's been keeping a secret from everyone, including her husband. Helena was born into captivity. Her father was the infamous Marsh King, the man who abducted a 14 year old girl and kept her there as his 'wife' and after Helena was born kept her there too in a remote cabin away from civilization. Helena wasn't aware of any of this as she grew up, not until she and her mother escaped when she is 12 years old. One day on the way home from an outing Helena hears on the radio that her father has escaped from prison and immediately fears for her family's safety. The book alternates between past and present as Helena tells us her story.

"I won't tell you my mother's name. Because this isn't her story. It's mine"

I appreciated the fact that this wasn't Helena's mother's story and that I wasn't privy to the horrible things she went through any more than her daughter was. The details of rape and most of the beatings were left out of the story. I don't think that I could have read this had it been from the mother's perspective.

I think the author did an admirable job of showing what it would be like to be raised in captivity (even though Helena didn't know she was) and the psychological effect it has on her and on her mother. The way her father shaped who she became, the way he turned her against her mother, and the way her mother was almost invisible as a person to her was hard to read at times. There were times when I wanted to hate Helena because she idolized her father and felt next to nothing for her mother, but I could understand why so I couldn't hate her. Even as an adult though, sometimes her thoughts about her parents infuriated me, then I would have to remind myself that she was psychologically manipulated as a child and so her view was inaccurate to an extent even as an adult. In the end though it did seem like she finally understood everything the way it really was.

I liked the ending of the book and the showdown with her father was good and had its thrilling moments, but it felt a bit rushed considering how much time was spent on the backstory. I felt like the past, even though it was essential to the story, actually took over a little too much of the book. Overall this was very good though and I recommend it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons for giving me a copy of this book.

It's a story that will leave you thinking about way long after you finish reading it. It's a daring tale of a woman against all odds, but with a set of skills like no other. Go girl!

I had read so much hype about The Marsh King’s Daughter, I was eager to read the advance copy I received from Penguin Group/Putnam & NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. I was expecting a riveting psychological thriller, filled with suspense. What I got was a bit different…

I suppose I have to give it more than three stars, because it was REALLY unsettling. The protagonist, Helena, is a young wife and mother living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her husband and two daughters. She earns money selling homemade jam and jelly, and is making deliveries of her products when she hears on the radio that a prisoner has escaped from the local prison…a man who abducted a girl and and kept her prisoner for years (in “the marsh,” where they were apparently able to live for years without electricity, running water, heat, medical care, etc.). The prisoner, called “The Marsh King,” fathered a child with the girl, and the three of them lived in the marsh for years.

We learn early on that Helena was the baby, that her father is using all his Native American skills to elude the authorities, and that Helena is the only one who can track him and bring him to justice. We know this because it is beaten into our heads relentlessly. And we know that Helena’s childhood was an ugly one, when she tells us “…my childhood came to and end the day my father tried to drown my mother.” She “…was the daughter of a kidnapped girl and her captor. For twelve years, I lived without seeing or speaking another human being other than my parents.”

So yes, I was totally creeped out by the plot…by even more by the character whose horrific deeds form the frame for the plot. I know it was effective because I kept making noises when things happened in the story – noises that made my husband keep asking things like “Are you all right?”

So, we kind of know how the plot is going to unfold, although there are some twists and turns along the way. It is more a tracking story than a mystery, and it is somewhat might mare-inducing…but again, this sort of tells me that Dionne accomplished what she set out to do: write a memorable thriller. Did I LIKE it? No. Do I recommend it? Yes. It isn’t my kind of thing, but I know many people who will love it. Four stars.

Karen Dionne's engrossing psychological thriller, "The Marsh King's Daughter", kept me glued to its fast flipping pages. Its heroine, Helena Pelletier, finally has a wonderful life - a loving husband, 2 young daughters, and a successful job she designed to fit her own talents and interests.

But she knows that it's all at risk when her abusive and controlling father (who kidnapped her mother as a teen and kept them both close and under his eye in their cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula marshlands) escapes from jail. Helena had not told her husband her background, which now (twenty years later) comes out.

Helena is convinced that she's the only one capable of tracking down her father before he destroys her life again - after all, he taught her everything he knew. But her feelings are mixed - despite his brutal treatment, she still loves the man. Will she be able to do what she has to, to stop him?

A full review will be posted on BookLoons within the month.

What an excellent read! I have to admit that is was even more appealing because I know the area the book takes place. It's always fun to read a book about someplace you know.

Great character development. I look forward to reading more by Dionne.

I came across this book a few months ago. I knew it wasn't going to be released until June but I couldn't wait to read it. Once I started reading, I didn't want to stop. Real life always get in the way when I'm in the middle of a good book.

The narrator tells us that her mother was famous for things no one would never want to be famous for. She says we may recognize her mother's name, but we probably haven't thought about her for years....but she is sure we would remember she had a daughter and we would wonder what happened to her.

Helena was twelve and her mother was twenty-eight when they were recovered from their captor. Helena had no idea they were captives. She never went to school, never rode a bicycle, never knew electricity or running water and only ever spoke with two people in twelve years. Her mother and father.

We learn that after leaving the marsh, Helena really struggled with social skills. After years of living only with her mother and father, Helena had to learn how to fit in and how to act in public and social situations.

After all these years, Helena seems to finally have the life she deserves. The bad days are behind her. Happily married with two daughters and her thriving business.

Unfortunately, the past isn't as buried as deep she thought.....

The story begins in the present. Helena Pelletier is dropping off orders of her homemade jam. Tourists and locals love her jam, sales are good. Helena decides to take her three-year old daughter, Mari to the beach after deliveries are done. She loses track of time and needs to hurry to meet her older daughter's bus. She turns on the radio in hopes that the music will help with her toddlers current meltdown. As she flips through the radio stations she hears the words escaped....prisoner ....armed and dangerous. It repeats. A dangerous man has escaped from prison, killing two guards in the process. They believe he's headed for the wild life refuge close to her home. But when she hears the name of the prisoner her heart nearly stops.

Jacob Hollbrook aka "The Marsh King" was serving a life sentence for child abduction and other crimes. The reason Helena is so horrified is that SHE is the one who put him in prison.

Jacob Hollbrook.....is her father.

She worries the police won't find him. He's in his element in the woods. She may have felt safe from him when he was behind bars. But now everything has changed. She hoped she would be able to tell her husband, Stephen all of the things she meant to tell him all of these years. However, before she has the chance, the police arrive to question her. They want to know if she knows where her father is. Stephen is in shock and also terrified for his family. He decides they should go to his parents until her father is captured. Helena tells him she must stay behind to help the police. Which is only partially true.

What she doesn't tell her husband is that she is going to go after her father. She's the only one who will be able to find him...using the skills her taught her himself.

She is The Marsh King's daughter and he taught her well.

The book alternates between the past and the present. Told from Helena's perspective, we learn a lot about her childhood. Her relationship with her father at the centre of it all. I can't imagine the internal struggle and conflicting emotions she would have, growing up the way she did. Twelve years is a long time and the bond has been created whether we like it or not. It would not be as easy as we think to turn off those feelings.

The Marsh King's Daughter fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, is interspersed between chapters, which added to the story.

I've often wondered about women like Elisabeth Fritzl, Amanda Berry, and Jaycee Dugard and so many other women who have escaped or been rescued after being held captive for years. I've occasionally wondered about the children as well but this book really made it hit home for me. Of course it's difficult for the women who were help captive, but the children who were conceived and born in similar conditions? How would they acclimate to their new world?...new lives?

The characters, setting, and the plot are very well developed. Karen Dionne did an amazing job bringing her characters to life. Helena is damaged but also very brave and strong. I'm not a hunter so I did a bit of a hard time reading some of the aspects of the hunting, killing and cleaning of the animals. However, I don't feel it was done in a way to glorify violence but it's a part of the story. This is how they lived and survived and it's amazing the things Helena learned at such a young age.

An amazing read that I really could have read it in one sitting. As I neared the end there's not much that could have torn me away. Compelling, intense, and unputdownable. This book is one that is going to stay with me for a very long time. I can't wait to see what Karen Dionne writes next.

Thank you G.P. Putnam's Sons and Karen Dionne for providing an advanced readers copy of this book for me to read in exchange for my honest review.

This reminds me of survivors’ stories like Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart. The difference is that a) it’s a novel and b) it’s written from the perspective of the abductee’s child. So it would be as if Jaycee Dugard’s child wrote a book (well, a novelization). The Marsh King’s Daughter holds such a sting of truth and realism that I actually checked to see whether it was a biography or a memoir. (Nope, it’s a novel.)

Alternating between flashbacks and present day, the story is narrated by Helena, the offspring of an abducted woman and her kidnapper. The flashbacks are about Helena’s mostly very happy childhood in a remote Michigan marsh with her parents; the current account follows her father’s prison escape and her attempt to track him. Each flashback reveals more of the mozaic pieces that make up her father, and although they should help us understand him, they don’t, or at least not very much. We never get the pieces that fully explain the motivation behind his actions, beyond repeated statements that he’s a narcissist, as if that explains everything.

FYI, a few parts, though not especially graphic, were not for the fainthearted. The pacing felt a bit slow in the middle. Overall, however, it was a unique and powerful story from a talented storyteller.

I got about 25% of the way through this book and couldn't get through the rest. I am a fan of psychological thrillers with good plots and well developed characters, but this book simply did not hook me. The plot sounded fascinating; in short, a young woman is kidnapped as a teen, and is forced into captivity by a much older man who decides to live off the land in the marshlands of Michigan. The young woman becomes pregnant, and has to raise her child without the basic necessities (hot water, indoor plumbing, clean clothes, warm food, etc.).

The story picks up many years later after the kidnapped woman has passed. It focuses on the young woman's daughter, whose father is now in prison for kidnapping her mother. The book is told from the first person perspective of the young woman's daughter, who now has her own family, has changed her name, and has kept her identity secret from her husband and children. Her father escapes prison, and the young woman's daughter decides to go on manhunt (or, I suppose, a womanhunt) for her father. She knows him best because she lived off the land with him. In the process, she abandons her family.

Perhaps this was the point of the book, but I did not like the narrator. Her actions frustrated me, and while her words did give me some insight into being raised in captivity, I found myself despising her. Maybe she has Stockholm syndrome, but she was constantly praising and defending her father's actions. She had little sympathy for her mother, who her father abused and raped. The story was so dark that I just had to stop reading. This book might be for some readers out there, but I just couldn't wrap my head around the narrator's behavior or justification for defending her father and leaving her girls to find him.

If The Marsh King's Daughter was a baby, it's parents would be Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain and Chevy Stevens' Still Missing. While I appreciated Dionne's decision to interrupt her story with fragments of the Marsh King fairy tale, it does take the whole novel to figure out the significance this story has to Helena, whose father is her mother's kidnapper and rapist. Presently, Helena's intuition and her trusty three-legged sidekick Rambo, help her navigate life now that her father has escaped from prison. There are moments in the story where you get frustrated with Helena's decisions, both past and present. However, what this novel succeeds in doing is making me reconsider what life must be like for young women who have been kidnapped and hidden from the world all of a sudden become "free" from their captors. The media frenzy begins while they have to readjust to the way life works in 2017.

Excellent read! Exciting right up to the last page. I devoured this book because I had to know what happened. I will definitely be looking for more books from this author.

Helena has a great life with her husband and kids and a booming jam business in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The family is happy living in the wild woods until she hears on the news that the man who kidnapped her mom and kept them hostage for much of her life has escaped from prison. Instantly she is back in survival mode and knows that the man who taught her to hunt, fish and hide must now be the prey. If Helena fails she knows he will take out his vengeance on her family. The story shows a daughter's love for her father and how that loss of innocence as she begins to understand his cruel nature. This is a sprint of a psychological thriller that will have you alternate between listening for unseen threats and the hammering of your heart. You may find yourself just a bit more aware of your surroundings. Interwoven into the story is the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale of the same name that works beautifully with Helena's story. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

This book was not a suspense thriller nor did it "chill me to the bone." Mostly it pissed me off. Sorry, but amid all the glowing 4 and 5 star reviews, there is my takeaway. I detested the main character, Helena, and I am sorry for the couple of hours I spent of my life reading this.

It had a great premise, the daughter of a man who abducted a young teenaged girl and kept them in the marsh for years, comes of age and FINALLY decides to DO SOMETHING about the life she is living though she worships her horror of a father. The "Marsh King" is a sadistic bastard, a narcissitic sociopath, who tutors his daughter on the ways of the native Americans who lived in the upper peninusla. The skills he teaches her are meant only to recreate Helena in his image, and take her love away from her poor mother. Helena has little use for her abused mother wanting only to please her monster of a father. Helena learns to hunt, track and kill. When she makes a mistake, she is punished. But does that affect her feelings for her father -- oh no. Yeah, I get that she's a child but she totally lacks any empathy or insight. When help comes in the form of a lost snowmobiler, she finally decides it's time to take her mother away.

This was a very depressing book. I am sure that I will be in the minority not finding anything redemptive in Helena's final stand. Too little, too late. I really wanted to like it, but I didn't. Every little petty thought Helana had made me angry. I get that she and her mother were VICTIMS, but instead of being some sort of solace to her mother, she chose her father's path. Sure she was a bit afraid of her father, but she did not really see his evil -- oh yes, I understand that he was all she knew of men. Their isolated life, their lack of any information about the world outside. Helena had no empathy for her mother's plight nor did she care much about her. Definitely Helena was the Marsh King's Daughter above all else. She had a bit of psychopathy herself!

Thank you to NetGalley and Edelweiss as well as the publisher for the e-book ARC to read and review. It was just not my cup of tea and I wouldn't recommend it.

A thrilling story of survival and coming to terms with one’s background and biology, this book tackles tough subjects while maintaining a breakneck pace of readability. The unique voice of the narrator captured this evocative, brutal, and believable story of a woman, on the hunt for her father, who had captured her mother as a teenager.

This book was one that I really was looking forward too and there may lie the problem, I got too hyped up and expected too much. This book started off great and after about 75 pages I began to fall asleep....literally. I want a book that makes me want to stay up, heart beating so fast I cant sleep. Well this wasnt that book.