Oh wow, boy does this author know how to weave atmosphere, intrigue and mystery into a story. With a foundation formed from Andersen's dark tale of the same name which is quoted and mentioned throughout, we follow Helena who, on the face of things, is a happily married mother of two but deep down, holds a dark secret. She is actually the daughter of a notorious serial killer nicknamed The Marsh King who abducted her mother as a teenager, holding her in a cabin near the marshes. Once liberated at 12 years old, Helena struggled with normal life after being isolated for so long, and so changed her name to escape her notoriety. Now married to photographer Stephen, with two girls, Iris and Mari, she makes jams and jellies to sell, safe in the knowledge that her father is in prison and she is free of her past. One day, in the car on the way home, a radio news bulletin catches her ear. Her father has escaped. Wracked with fear, and a whole host of other emotions, she struggles on home with the intention of fessing up to her husband who, prior to this, has no knowledge of her past. Things don't go to plan and he ends up leaving with the children. But this new twist is actually in her favour as Helena is now free to go hunting her father. Can she repeat what she did before and see her father safely back into jail. Convinced that she knows more than the police ever could about his ways and means, about the marshland she grew up around, she is the only one that can find him. But, will she find him before he finds her?
As I was reading this, I didn't really think too much about what I was reading. It all seemed to flow nicely off the page and into my head. The description of the marshlands weaving its poetic spell on me in a kind of hypnotic way. The story told within these pages is also more than the sum of its parts as it wasn't until I go to the end and thought back over what I had just read that the realisation of the whole story became clear to me. It's kind of like there's a lot that is subtle along the way but that bubbles under throughout and then suddenly things become clear.
As Helena was trying to find her father, we began a new thread telling the story of how her father took her mother, how he hid her away and started to condition her. How Helena was born and her formative years not knowing the full situation of her parent's relationship. We watched as her father taught her the life skills she needed to survive on the marshland. As she taught herself other things from books. How her relationships with her parents changed as the book progressed. Each story from the past introduced into the present at just the right time to enhance and illustrate the current timeline.
What I really loved about this book was Helena's relationship with her father. How she at the same time both adores and despises him. Having lived for her first 12 years with just her parents for company and not knowing anything of the real world she has been conditioned by her father, the stronger parent, and despite his treatment of both her and her mother, has taught her many things from an early age which has garnered her respect and indeed, in a strange kind of way, her love. From the time he gifts her her first knife, to her first animal kill, the bond between father and daughter is so strong that when the truth came out, it must have completely devastated her. I also admired Helena's grit and determination to get on with things and the life she has managed to forge for herself since her liberation. Even though I am not a fan of secrets, even I can well understand her need to keep her past in the past and I really felt for her when it all got dragged up again. I was initially a little bit torn with the way the final scenes played out and maybe also a little let down by the repercussions (or lack thereof) but I can see why it happened as it did even with my personal reservations. I would also like to see what happens next for Helena and her family. I think that's me not wanting to let go of the characters that I have got to know so well during our short time together which also reflects on the author's skill in characterisation.
This is my first book by this author but I will definitely be checking out her back catalogue.

My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I really loved the book. i loved Hannah's perspective about her childhood and how different it is from an outsider's point of view. A must read !

Had my doubts about it regarding the subject matter, but it defies expectations. Sensitive exploration of parenting, abandonment, our relationship to the wild and to each other.

Helena seems to be an average American mom. She juggles home life and her own business just like anyone else. Sure she vanishes sometimes overnight into the Michigan Upper Peninsulas, taking her dog on bear hunts. But she's just a mom. Except for the fact until she was 12 she had never barely left her cabin in the marshlands she grew up in. Instead her education from her father is hunting and killing, living off the land. And it's only when she's 12 that she learns her mother isn't there by choice. Instead she was kidnapped as a young girl and held captive by the father that Helena adores....So now with a new identity and new life she has tried to leave this behind but her father has other ideas...

As thrillers go I would have to say this moves pretty slowly. But it's a stealthy slowness, the story creeps slowly into your psyche, pulling you in deeper and deeper. As the heroine of this piece Helena feels like she should be unlikeable - this is the woman who as a girl dreamed of hunting a killing a doe that was pregnant with twins! And yet somehow she's easy to connect with. There's an honesty about the character, an innocence even in the adult narration that I found endearing. Even as violence unfurls she is single minded and strong. She's just a great creation. This is an enthralling and tense novel, one of this year's must read thrillers.

Thanks to Netgalley, author and publisher for this digital ARC for an honest review.

When notorious child abductor, known as the Marsh King, escapes from a maximum security prison, Helena suspects the she and her two young daughters are in danger. Not even her Helenas husband knows the truth about her past. That she was born in captivity with no contact with the outside world before she was 12. Or that her father raised her to be a killer.

The book alternates between Helenas past and present. The storyline is tense, honest and disturbing. I really liked Helenas character. She is also the narrator. The authors descriptions of the marshlands made you feel that you knew the area. A well written book of which I recommend.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Little Brown Book Group UK and the author Karen Dionne for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'd heard quite a lot about The Marsh King's Daughter before reading it, all of it good. There's always a risk when that happens that the book will let you down, so with slight trepidation, and without knowing anything about the story, I started to read.

And boy, what a read it was! I thought that the Marsh King's Daughter was an incredibly written book, the amount of research that the author must have put into the story is mindblowing.

I really liked that the story was told from Helena's point of view, going from when she was really young all the way up to an adult and a parent herself. The journey took Helena from a young child, totally unaware of the circumstances of her existence and the world beyond the marsh that she lives in with her mother and father, who she totally idolises as he teaches her how to survive in the wild, to track and hunt animals, and, perhaps most importantly, to disrespect her mother.

But as Helena grows up she can't help but see flaws in her father, and she begins to see that maybe her mother is stronger than she ever imagined.

The Marsh King's Daughter is sometimes upsetting and hard to read, the brutality that her father displayed is extreme. What made it even harder to read was how real it felt, I often got so caught up in the story that I was sure that Helena was real and that I was, in fact, reading a true crime book.

Karen Dionne is not an author that I had heard of before The Marsh King's Daughter but she is certainly an author that I will be looking out for and very keen to read more of. I am completely in awe of how she crafted this book, it is definitely one to add to your reading pile.

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of The Marsh King's Daughter through Netgalley.

Helena has a good life. A loving husband. Two wonderful daughters. And a secret. She was born in the marsh, the daughter of a kidnapped girl and her brutal kidnapper. She grew up in isolation, idolising her father. Until the day it ended.
Her father is in prison. Her mother is dead. And Helena is getting on with her life. Nobody knows her secret past – but they are about to find out. Because her father has escaped from jail. And he’s heading her way.
I’ve been seeing some buzz about this book for a while now. Netgalley has been shoving it under my nose for a good few months, so I was a little surprised when I discovered that it still hadn’t been released. But Little, Brown were good enough to let me have an e-copy to take a look at, so needless to say, my curiosity got the better of me.
What impressed me most about this one is how it isn’t aping the current tropes of modern popular crime fiction. For example, the narrator in question doesn’t seem to be unreliable and there isn’t any issues about whether or not her boyfriend/husband wants to kill her. Which makes a change. In fact, in the days of twist-laden, or, more usually, “twist”-laden thrillers, this is a breath of fresh air.
You see, the plot is pretty straightforward without any major surprises in it. Which you might think is a bad thing but what lifts this book is the quality of the writing. Alternating between Helena’s life in captivity and the present-day hunt for her father, this is never less than a mesmerising read.
Helena is a beautifully constructed character, her behaviour in extreme circumstances (both past and present) never feels anything less than utterly real and convincing. The story is basically all about her and I basically found myself walking around with my Kindle – I found it literally unputdownable.
While some of my readers, the more classic-mystery minded of you, might find the lack of surprise in the plot disappointing. I’d still recommend this book and suggest that you give it a try. A very impressive piece of work and Highly Recommended.
The Marsh King’s Daughter is out as an ebook on 13th June and in hardback on 29th June, from Little, Brown books.

A story of how love and hate can be so intertwined in our hearts that it can be difficult to separate them. The Marsh Kings daughter takes our imagination to places we should celebrate that we never have to go.
Imagine this if you will. You are a married Mum of 2 daughters which are the joy of your life, you have a successful small business making jams and jellies from wild fruits and a gentle devoted husband from whom you have completely concealed your past, not to deceive or even because you are ashamed but because it’s just so damned complicated, you don’t want your family notoriety to define you and there was never the right time to bring it up.
Of course your past does shape your present and your future and Helena is undoubtedly not your average soccer Mom. It is this apartness which attracted her lovely husband Stephen to her in the first place. With a seeming natural affinity with all things wild and of nature, he accepts her need to go off on sudden back to nature breaks, camping and hiking in the wilderness alone. (He is a STAR, I want one just like him)
Now imagine that what you have kept all to your little self all these 10 years of marriage is that you were raised in that wilderness until the age of 11, in a rustic shack with only the most basic belongings, furnishings, clothing, even food by your Ma who is always quiet, withdrawn, undemonstrative and with whom you find it difficult to relate, and your Pa, who is half native American, larger than life, deeply knowledgeable about the wilderness in which you live, and you adore him, you want to impress this big guy, your only desire is to emulate him and he spends a lot of time with you coaching you in tracking skills, hunting and gathering and being tough and resilient just like him. You need to be, because he can also be a very cruel man and even as a tot you are not immune to his sudden burst of rage and cold punishment. He is brutal and harsh with his own moral code.
You’ve never been to school, in fact you’ve never met another human being, you’ve never even owned a toy, you have no tv or radio and no up to date books, your life of splendid isolation is total, your only knowledge that there even is an outside world is gleaned from a well thumbed pile of old Geographic magazines, amongst the pages are your imaginary friends.
You wouldn’t know you were any different from other folk, that this not a normal way to live. That most little girls can’t shoot a gun with unerring accuracy as coached by their Dad, that most young lasses would shriek at the thought of skinning and gutting a still warm rabbit. That all daughters aren’t regularly thrown into a deep dark well when they make even a minor transgression.
How do you think you could cope with being presented with the sudden knowledge that the reason your Mom is so hard to reach is that your Dad abducted her when she was little more than a child herself, keeping her prisoner all these years and that far from being the much loved child of a married couple you are the product of rape? Hmm, how do you field that curved ball?
Fast forward to present day, the family ties you have tried so hard to leave in the past, abruptly burst onto your horizon when you discover that your Pa (the one you hero worshipped the one you despise) in whose capture and eventual imprisonment you played a massive part, has escaped from jail, into the wilderness which he and you know so well. His presence out there is an immediate threat to you, and even worse, to your innocent family.
What would YOU do?

This is going to be one of the big books for Summer 2017 and I can absolutely understand why! The Marsh Kings Daughter is a sumptuously dark and atmospheric thriller with a heroine you won't ever forget.

I don't think I've read such an intricately detailed and unique plot like this for a very long time. It wasn't at all what I was expecting and I enjoyed it all the more for that. There are many real life documented cases where babies have been born to women in captivity, but here there is no sensationalized return to real life for Helena, who has spent the first 12 years of her life living in an isolated cabin with her mother and her father. There she was a daddy's girl who learnt to hunt and fish, idoling her father as she explored the wilderness of the marshes. Until the day she discovers the truth about her birth. Years later, Helena is almost unrecognisable as that young girl and is married with two small daughters. She still uses her hunting skills whilst her foraging expertise has lead to her own business selling jams and jellies to local outlets. But when her father escapes from prison she knows she is going to have to use those skills to outwit The Marsh King.

Once I started to read that first page, I was hooked. I loved how the retelling of the fable of The Marsh Kings Daughter ran throughout the book parallel to Helena's narrative as she slowly reveals the secrets of her childhood. In fact, everything about this original and gripping literary thriller kept me deeply enthralled due to its authentic and convincing storylines. Be warned that it was rather tough reading at times though, especially when observing Helenas differing attitudes towards her parents and there is also a lot of detail in the hunting scenes that could be a little overpowering for some but was a huge part of what made Helena who she is today.

The Marsh Kings Daughter is a must read summer 2017 book. It's an intelligently written, intriguing book that everyone will be talking about so buy your copy now!

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne is a novel I won’t be forgetting about for a long while. It is a powerful, emotional story about a girl defined by her past but who desperately seeks to control her own destiny.

Helena is a young woman with two daughters and a loving husband, Stephen. She lives a tranquil life and earns money for her family by making jam and jelly. But Helena is no ordinary young woman. Helena grew up in captivity. Her mother was kidnapped as a young girl by Helena’s father and gave birth to her during the time that she was held captive. For fourteen years they were both under Helena’s father’s control before their miraculous rescue. But now, Helena’s father has escaped from prison, Helena fears for her family’s safety and heads out into the wilderness to track him down.

The Marsh King’s Daughter has to be one of the best books I have read this year. Karen’s writing is very addictive and she draws you into the story. The novel is told over two timelines, in the present when Helena has learnt the news of her father’s escape and the time when she and her mother were her father’s prisoners. Both stories were equally captivating and there were heart wrenching moments in each. The pace in the novel is excellent, I raced through the final chapters and Karen really delivers on the ending. The book definitely kept me reading well into the night.

This is a novel that you’ll want to watch out for in the summer. A great read. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a copy to read.

This is seriously good, showing the dark and savage realities of life as a prisoner and a child conceived from rape.
Helena Pelletier is a strong and assertive character throughout this book. Her father, the titular Marsh King, abducted her mother when she was a schoolgirl of 14, and made her his wife. She bore him a daughter, Helena, and all three lived in seclusion, using the wilderness to provide food and shelter.There is a fascinating wealth of detail about Native Americans, tracking and killing prey, Helena being given tattoos and a knife for her fifth birthday, but cruelty too. This is a real survivalist handbook!.
When Helena is informed that her father has escaped from prison, she knows he will come looking for her and her family. She hasn't told her husband Stephen about her background, he only finds out when the Police visit. Helena has to save her family and it will be a case of Kill or be Killed.
This is a very atmospheric book. Interspersed amongst the harshness of captive existence, we are told the story of the Marsh King by Hans Christian Anderson,it makes a strange juxtaposition.
Jacob Holbrook, her father, has great pride in his daughter, as long as his word is absolute. When Helena begins to question his authority and asks too many uncomfortable questions, that is when his attitude changes and there is cruelty and spite in his actions. Her mother never recovers fron her ordeal, and although the young Helena despises her for being weak, she begins to understand more when she herself becomes a parent.
This would make a brilliant film! A novel that doesn't dwell on Stockholm syndrome, but draws upon a persons hidden strength and determination to protect all those that are held dearest. I have posted this review on Goodreads today.

Didn't finish this book. Good idea for a story but as an animal lover and e-activist I couldn't stand the bear hunting part!

Yes. Just all the yes! It’s been a really long time since I stayed up wayyyy too late because I couldn’t put a book down, but this one forced me too.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is a fast-paced, thrilling, creepy, empowering, brilliant story about a girl who was brought up in the wilderness, taught to hunt and track by her unpredictable father (at a very young age), and who never met another single person other than her father and her parents until she was 12 years old.

She didn’t know it, but Helena was her father’s prisoner, just like her mother was.

Helena, now happily married with two little girls, has made a nice life for herself, but it came at a price. She became a new person and never told anyone who her father is. She wasn’t able to visit him in prison even though sometimes she wanted to.

When she hears on the news that he has escaped from the maximum security prison he was being held, killing two men, Helena is in no doubt that he’ll come for her and her girls, but luckily for her The Marsh King taught her everything he knew.

I loved so much about this story. Helena took to the wild life from an early age. She loved hunting, tracking, shooting, killing. She was a prisoner but she didn’t know it, and ironically the marsh offered her a freedom normal children will never experience. She had many happy times and she often idolised her Native American father. But she also feared him, and knew that his relationship with her mother was strange.

I found it really interesting how Helena viewed her mother. They hadn’t bonded and she wondered if she loved her. She didn’t understand why her mum was so weak and not present. The thought of staying in the cabin and making jam with her mum made her skin crawl. Her mum’s story is the truly harrowing element of this novel.

The whole way through I wondered if Helena’s mum had made the decision to not tell her about the situation out of fear, or because she wanted her to have some normality in her childhood. I wanted to know if she’d ever tried to escape, and if not, why not, but I think it was a much better story not knowing that as we only see through the eyes of Helena – which I thought was really powerful.

The Marsh King’s Daughter was great from the beginning but the second half of the book was outstanding, I really could not put it down. I needed to know if Helena and her lovely family would be OK; what she would say to her father when she saw him; If she could survive once more? I think she has to be one of my favourite protagonists of recent years, and I know her story will stay with me for a long, long time.

Wow, this was different, how do you describe this book it is unlike any I have read before.Helena was brought up in a swamp learning to hunt learning knife skills and other skills to survive in such an inhospitable environment not skills that you need under normal circumstances, but this book is not about normal,and she will need these skills as an adult ,and that is where you need to set aside a chunk of time because if you are like me you will not want to put your kindle down.I can't and won't give anything away but if you enjoy reading this you will be page turning at a frantic pace to find out what will happen.For me that is what reading a good book is all about I can't ask for more from a book than to grab me and take me along for the ride and this book does that and then some.Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC in return for an honest review.

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Dem's review May 12, 2017 · edit
really liked it

I really think that 2017 is fast becoming the year of the Thrillers and the The Marsh King's Daughter is without doubt a smart well thought out and entertaining read and one that I can see becoming a big hit over the summer.
When I read the premise of this Novel it really caught my attention and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it........
'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.'
When notorious child abductor - known as the Marsh King - escapes from a maximum security prison, Helena immediately suspects that she and her two young daughters are in danger.

The book alternates skillfully between Helena's past and present and the reader learns about Helen and her life. Characters are well drawn and the plot is well thought out and chilling in places.
I was a little afraid going into this one that it might be very graphic and while I did find a few of the hunting scenes quite tough reading, I understand the authors need to write these scenes as part of the bigger picture and they can be easily skimmed over if the reader finds them too much.

A really well written novel, chilling, suspenseful, fresh and certainly one I will be recommending to my friends to pack for holidays this summer.

My thanks to Net Galley for the chance to read an advance copy in return for an honest review
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This is a very interesting and original novel. When we meet Helena she is married to Stephen, with two young daughters and a successful business. However, she has a secret which is about to catch up with her. For Helena’s mother was kidnapped by her father - held captive by Jacob Holbrook, the man dubbed, ‘the Marsh King.’ When Holbrook escapes from prison, Helena has to admit to her husband that is the daughter of a convicted criminal. She had kept this secret from everyone, having created a new life for herself away from notoriety. Now, with her new family under threat, Helena knows that only she can stop her life unravelling, by using the tracking techniques her father taught her as a child, and catching him.

In this novel, we follow Helena’s search for her father, as well as learning about her isolated childhood. Helena idolised her father as a young girl; obviously accepting her situation as normal as she knew nothing different. So we understand, and sympathise with, her conflicted feelings, as she tracks the man who taught her everything about the wilderness, while learning how she grew up and how she gradually realised that her father was not the ideal man she first imagined. In the marsh, though, only Helena is her father’s equal and it soon becomes apparent that he is aware she is behind him…

Although this is an excellent novel, it is hard to know how to describe it. I would call it a literary thriller, if anything. However, the story really comes to life when we learn about Helena’s childhood and her gradual realisation that her small, confined world, has become too small for her. I really enjoyed this novel; especially the central character of Helena herself. This is certainly an assured, and impressive, debut and I look forward to reading more by the author.

I've seen a lot of pre-release hype about this book, which isn't always a good thing. Fortunately, Dionne's new novel delivers: it is an engaging, propulsive tale that could certainly be a breakthrough book for her (she has written five other crime novels, including two TV drama tie-ins).

While I don’t think it quite rises to all the ‘suspense thriller of the year’ pre-release fanfare (I've already read a couple of books this year that I'd rank ahead of it), it is a really great read that I thoroughly enjoyed, found incredibly difficult to put down, and would highly recommend.

Helena lives a simple country life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, selling handcrafted jams made from wild ingredients, and living on land her grandparents once owned, with her husband Stephen, young daughters Iris and Mari, and their dog Rambo. All of that's upturned when an infamous convict escapes, slaughtering two prison guards in the process

Almost three decades ago, 'The Marsh King' snatched a fourteen-year-old girl and took her to a remote cabin in the marshlands, keeping her in captivity as his wife. Helena is the daughter of that abducted girl, and the daughter of the Marsh King. She was raised in the wild, learning not only to fish and hunt, but how to track, how to gut, skin, and tan deer hides, and more. In many ways she loves the man who raised her, who'd kept her apart from the world but taught her to love the outdoors and be able to survive in the wilderness. Who told her stories from their Ojibwa culture.

As law enforcement launches a manhunt, Helena knows her father, with all his survivalist skills and tracking abilities, will simply disappear into the wilderness, if that's what he wants. But what does he want? This loving and cruel man who raised her, both a mentor and a narcissistic bully.

Helena realises she may be the only one who can find him, using the very skills he taught her.

This is a thoroughly engaging read that's quite different to most of the crime fiction out there, both for its depiction of 'live off the land' life, and the fairy tale themes running throughout. THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER is largely told in flashback, revealing Helena’s life growing up isolated from civilization, while interspersing snatches of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name.

As Helena hunts her father in the present and reminisces on her past, Dionne superbly captures the mixed emotions, the love and hate. How people are never just one thing. She keeps the pages whirring through a creeping sense of unease bubbling beneath day-to-day life in the isolated cabin.

For me, having grown up in an outdoorsy part of the world as a keen hiker of surrounding national parks, the scenes of hunting and basic life in the wild are particularly evocative. Dionne takes us deep into aspects of life that most readers will have little knowledge of, while never overwhelming with too much information (although some readers may find scenes relating to hunting etc tough).

There's plenty of darkness in this tale - how could there not be when it deals with child abduction, people living in captivity and deprivation? - but also light. THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER flies along, but also makes you ponder. An exquisitely crafted tale that builds to a thrilling denouement.

This book is brilliant. It is very well written and has obviously been well researched. I have heard a lot of hype about this book and it definitely lives up to it. I am so glad I requested it. The book is narrated by Helena and her story is unique. It is so believable and you can understand her feelings and how she desperately wants a normal family life for her 2 daughters. I have heard this book compared to Room. It is different from it in a lot of ways. Being kidnapped and held captive is probably the only similarity. This book is a brilliant read that I would definitely recommend and I will be talking about it for a long time.

The introduction to this book tells us that Helena has been held captive for years as a child. It was Helena's mother who was actually abducted by her father. The writing was good and I was interested. Into the main story and there is an immediate simplicity to the writing start. Helena is doing deliveries and looking after her daughter. There is warmth and comfort and everyday life. And then - the news comes on the radio that Helena's father has escaped from prison.

The story explores the aftermath of Helena's father escape from prison through her eyes. It comes in the form of a dialogue with the reader and feels personal. Early on we find out that Helena's husband knows nothing of her real background and it's obvious that there is a lot to come out in this story.

The book time shifts between the present day and Helena's life in the marsh before she and her mother got away. We get Helena's account of her childhood in the marsh and her life with her parents over the course of the book. I found this flowed quite naturally with me offering reflection on the past and action in the present.

This is a very good tense tale at its simplest and well told too. However it does go quite a bit deeper than that for me. It is clear from quite early on that there is an ambivalence about Helena's relationship with her father. Equally it is clear that the person she is now is in part a result of her circumstances in childhood as well as thing good and bad that she got from her father.

I really did find this deceptively easy to read. All too often I thought "I'll just read a bit more". It became harder and harder to actually put down. An easy read maybe but a very good one indeed.

Thanks Little, Brown Book Group UK and netgalley fro this ARC.

Grips your soul in a vice, makes you shiver and humbles the toughest heart- this is a powerful novel that is unforgettable.