A gripping page turner from the very first page. The Marsh Kings daughter is about Helena daughter of child abductor. Who her mother was kidnapped as a child and made to live in the wilderness with her captor.

This was a beautifully written, but sometimes scary novel that I couldn't put down. Better than others I read in this subject. This is one of them books that will stay with you for a long time. This is going to be a best seller.

I'm at a loss as to how to categorise this book. It's part thriller, part coming of age and just beautifully written. The descriptions of the wilderness are just fantastic and reading about Helena and her past and how the scales finally fall from her eyes regarding her father is both exhilarating and saddening. I zipped through it in 24 hours!

The Marsh King’s Daughter is a story about Helena, a young woman with 2 daughters, a loving husband and a thriving business making jam and jelly, who grew up in captivity in a cabin with her mother and father who happens to be a child abductor and murderer and has just escaped from prison. The Marsh King’s Daughter is a beautifully written story that is so much more than your average run-of-the-mill crime thriller. It is an incredibly descriptive, atmospheric and captivating account of Helena’s life. Switching between present day and the past the author brings to life Helena’s relationship with her father and mother, examines her complex and emotional feelings towards her father’s ranging from love and adoration to fear and anger. Focusing mainly on emotions, feelings and the relationships between families, this is a stunning book which is original and powerful. My thanks to Little Brown Book Group and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book prior to publication.

Loved this story. A great, thrilling concept that was different to the usual kind of thrillers you see. Highly recommended!

Although I felt this book was well-written, I found it difficult to enjoy or review. Partly this is because it's outside of my usual subject matter and genre, and so I don't have a lot of experience with similar books to say how it compares to those. Partly, it's because I found parts of it difficult to read -- the narrator talks very casually about violence and hunting and that sort of thing; I'm quite squeamish, which made it a little tricky to get through. And of course, there's the callousness with which she talks about her father's abusive behaviour. While fascinating in how it explores abuse and the extent to which children normalise their situation (even when it's absolutely not normal), it's still an uneasy read, and I don't know if there was enough emotional resolution to satisfy me. Although I wrote a brief review on Goodreads, I probably won't be reviewing this on my blog because I don't think I could do it justice.

I found this book truly unsettling, finishing it feeling distinctly off colour. It seeks to ally itself to novels such as Room or Forgetting Zoe but there was something about it that unnerved me even more than either of those. While Room emphasises the redemptive power of the bond between Jack and Ma, something which has helped them both to survive a horrific trauma and then Forgetting Zoe suggests that the pain can be overcome and left behind, The Marsh King's Daughter seems to have a darker message. While noting that her mother's story is generally listed alongside that of Amanda Berry and Jaycee Duggard, Helena is dismissive of her, barely names her, has little true loyalty. Born two years into her mother's captivity, Helena states that while other survivors note that the birth of their child was a source of comfort during their ordeal, the same was not true for the two of them. Helena took after her father, loved him, hero-worshipped him and knew no other way of life. Helena came into her world unaware of any other way of being - I think that what makes this so disturbing is that for so much of her childhood, she could not see the evil around her.

The narrative flicks back and forth between the adult and child Helena, with the adult having moved on, changed her name and severed all ties with her past. She is married to Stephen, has two daughters and makes a living selling jam and jellies to local stores and fairs, this being one of the few skills she learnt growing up that was truly transferable. All this is going well however until she overhears a bulletin on the radio that the Marsh King has escaped from custody and instinctively she knows that he will seek to reclaim her, seeing all that she has as his own. But she does have an advantage over the law enforcement agencies who are hunting him - she knows how he works, how he hunts, how he kills and Helena is determined to use this against him. Interspersed between Helena's recollections of her childhood and her present-day pursuit of her father are snippets from Hans Christian Andersen's The Marsh King's Daughter, a fittingly dark fairy-tale which gave Helena's father his name as coined by the media.

I was caught by the similarities in voice between Helena and Rosemary within We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, with the pair of them reminding me of a real-life account that I read a number of years ago which was written by a woman who had had a feral upbringing. For both there is that feeling of the outsider, of observing the human race rather than truly being a part of it. Helena feels offended when people told her afterwards that she must be so delighted to be in the real world. What is so fascinating about television? How is that better than life in the woods? She had loved hunting, living by the land, learning the Native American ways that her father held so dear. She had never longed for escape. It was other circumstances that brought things crashing down and even now, her loyalties are clearly insecure, true allegiances unclear even to herself.

The psychology of Helena's relationship with her father is fascinating - he was the defining force of her upbringing, the ultimate force of programming. He has raised her with his own version of Native American mythology, with Helena astounded at his trial to see his blonde-haired mother watching from the stands. Even all these years after the last time she saw him, Helena is still figuring out who he was, whether he truly loved her, what he wants from her now. Having been brought up to see the world through his eyes, Helena replicated his contempt for her mother. She knew that her mother's word held no weight, that her commands could be disobeyed when it suited. Dionne has created Helena as a true Electra, the girl who loves her father and despises her mother - how could someone raised to be fearless respect someone who has been ripped from their life, someone defeated, a girl who never got to become her own woman?

I think though that Dionne also captures the strange way that we look at victims - we need them to be strong, to be heroines, to have hated their predators and to have retained psychological integrity. Helena's mother was none of these things, she was a victim and she returned home as such, doomed to never quite grow up. And when the twelve year-old Helena was told that her father had kidnapped her mother, she had shrugged because how else did someone get a wife? What's so wrong about kidnapping? Even the adult Helena acknowledges that there was no way that her father could ever have found a woman willing to go and live with him in the marsh and that abduction was his only option. The uncomfortable way that Helena inherited her father's thought processes made her a protagonist who I shivered to be away from.

When girls like Jaycee Duggard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry or Gina Dejesus are rescued, society feels this terrible guilt for having failed to spot them, to have let their captors walk among them. We need to believe that the escape marks a happy ending, that they will find redemption. The Marsh King's Daughter considers what happens next, of how you can escape someone physically but how their fingerprints can still be all over your mind. Dionne has clearly worked hard to find her way into Helena's way of thinking to imagine how she might operate as a mother herself, of how she could be both intelligent woman and still retain the inner savage who she lived as until she was twelve. Her husband is loving, albeit still baffled by some of her quirks of behaviour but the detached way in which Helena seemed to observe him made it difficult to believe she truly cared for him. Her decision to withhold the truth of her childhood was understandable but their relationship still felt under-explored. The defining relationship in her life was the one she had with her father, even though it had been decades since she last saw him - how could there be room for a husband? Helena has built herself a life with all the trappings of normality but whether contentment is within her reach is less clear.

Helena would no doubt bristle if someone labelled her as her father's victim but that is what she was. I cringed from the brutality of his punishments, unable to put the book down but longing for the end. Dionne has created a complex and credible psychological realism but the depths of darkness which she reaches took me far beyond my comfort zone. The Marsh King's Daughter does not rule out recovery - Helena has accepted intellectually that her mother tried her best to love her, but then emotionally she still can only feel the distance between them. There are none of the moments of connection which made Room bearable and even at the end, I could only imagine Helena heading back into the wilderness alone, forever defined as the daughter of the Marsh King.

The premise of the book was interesting and a different take on the survivor story. You could understand her love for her father and how that was tested as she became older. Her reintegration to society was also well handled but I found it difficult to accept she had not told her husband and/or he did not recognise her as her story appeared to have been all over the news. It almost read as a young adult crossover with the husband relegated to a minor character.

This was a truly amazing book. Well described characters that made the story come alive. So much happiness arising from so much sadness. A wonderful story that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

When I requested this book, I did so on the strength of hearing other reviewers say that it was good, but I hadn’t, at that stage, seen the blurb.
So when the book started with an extract from the Hans Christian Anderson story, I was unsure what to expect. It did not take long, however, for me to be completely pulled into the story and once I was, I devoured it in 24 hours.
This is terrific storytelling by an author with a strong voice and very individual style. It deals with the lives of a young woman and her daughter, Helena, the titular protagonist. Set in the marshlands of Upper Michigan, an unforgiving part of the country, The Marsh King’s Daughter, tells the story of Helena, born of a sometimes sadistic, always narcissistic father and a cowed and subdued mother whom he abducted when she was just 14 years old.
For most of her young life, Helena did not know what her background was. She only understood that she lived in a backwoods cabin and that her father had to be obeyed and that the punishment for failing to do so would be harsh.
Self-taught in reading skills, her only literature is a diminishing pile of National Geographic magazines and an all too fleetingly available book of poems by Robert Frost. Her mother, unsurprisingly, is no great shakes as a cook – indeed their cabin does not even have an oven, so she grows up on what they can forage and catch and kill.
All Helena knows about the world is what she reads in National Geographic and what her father teaches her. They never see anyone else and thus Helena has a complex and fascinating relationship with her parents.
She quickly learns that her father’s rule is law and as he teaches her to fish and hunt she learns to be as expert a tracker as he is himself.
Early on into the book we learn that Helena’s father has escaped from prison and it is against this backdrop that we learn about Helena’s early life, how she coped once she and her mother did finally get free of their father and how she is able to reconcile those parts of her that she has kept secret from those who are now her closest family.
I loved the writing in this story and the way that Karen Dionne has cleverly woven her emotional material into a tangled web of love, compassion and betrayal.
A first rate book and a five star must read.

This was a riveting read and I rushed through it over the course of 24 hours desparate to find out what happened at the end.
The story is told in the first person by Helena a married mother of two young children. At first all seems normal as we hear about her day and trip to the beach with her youngest daughter. However on the way back in the car Helena hears about an escaped prisoner, a kidnapper and murderer and it is then that we learn that he is her father. Gradually it is revealed that he kidnapped her mother when she was only fourteen and held her hostage for 14 years during which time Helena was born.
Living in a remote area with no electricity or modern conveniences, Helena and her parents live off the land. She loves and admires her father not realising that her mother is a kidnap victim.
The story jumps between the current day as Helena frets about her father's escape and the past where we hear about her life as the Marsh King's Daughter. Sections of the book are introduced by the fairy tale of that name by Hans Christian Andersen and Helea's life seems to mirror that of Helga the girl in the story.
I loved the way Helena is so torn- as a young child she adored her father and he mostly treats her well- as long as she obeys the rules. However he is a narcissist as Helena herself admits and this leads to some very harrowing events when Helena has to decide how she wants her life to proceed. Her father is well described, her mother a more shadowy figure who Helena comes to understand as the novel progresses. The father daughter relationship is really key to the story and the whole plot hinges on it.
In fact the irony of the story is that the skills Helena learns from her father are the very ones she needs to track him down and protect her own family in the present day section of the book.
The descriptions of Helena's childhood are so interesting- it is hard to imagine growing up never seeing another person apart from your parents, learning to read from old magazines, spending your life hunting and fishing for food. In fact until she realises what is happening Helena loves her life and despises her mother for being so weak and powerless.
Having heard of these sort of events happening in the news over the last few years it does not seem such an unlikely story. The author had done her research well, both about the effects of being kidnapped as a child and also she knew a lot about the marsh landscape of Michigan where this strange family live.
I thoroughly recommend this book. Perfect for readers who enjoyed Emma Donaghue's book Room. Five stars from me. I can even imagine this being adapted as a film
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is atmospheric and brilliant storytelling from an author whose talent becomes increasingly obvious as you begin to read this tale. Its appeal lies in the twin interweaving of dark fantastical fairytale and the more human tale of the hunter and the prey, where these roles shift, change, merging into a hypnotic dance between father and daughter. Helena is married to Stephen, a photographer and has two daughters, Iris and Mari. She lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on the edge of the marsh wilderness. She created a new identity to escape the media coverage that followed her mother's kidnapping at 15 by the notorious Marsh King, Jacob Holbrook, Helena's father.

Helena is brought up on the marshes, seeing no other humans until she is 11 years old. She is a wild child, a daddy's girl, and instrumental in ensuring that her father went to prison. Her family know none of her well publicised history. The Marsh King has escaped, killing two guards, with the consequent police manhunt and media spotlight. Helena can no longer hide, she knows the only person with the skills to find her father is her, no-one knows him better, he is Nanabozho, the trickster, and she loves him. She is determined that she will return him to prison. The book is an intimate character study delivered from Helena's perspective. Each chapter starts with a part of the The Marsh King's Daughter fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson with inescapable connections to Helena's life.

Her father is a storyteller whose tales whilst blurring the line between fact and fiction are hardwired into her psyche, into her blood, and her sense of identity. His is the sole contributer to her unsurpassed abilities in hunting, tracking, wilderness and survival skills. He is everything, her mother barely features. She is him, his shadow, the pea to his pod. We learn of her time growing up in the marshes, her obsession with 50 year old National Geographics - her only knowledge of the world outside, her enthrallment with the Vikings, her use of the doll that her mother made for her for target practice. We are given glimpses into her father's volatility and his need for absolute control. But can Helena's remember everything? What exactly happened? What of Cousteau and Calypso? A faint memory tugs from her subconscious...something about the story her mother told her. This shapes a dangerous and blood spattered hunt for her father where her family is at stake into a journey into the past to come to terms with and acknowledge who she is.

This is a wonderful novel, it burrows into your consciousness and takes residence. It has an insidious charm with its themes of what it is to survive, love, loss, memory, and the problems associated with doing the right thing in a complicated family set up. The book has a riveting narrative interweaving the fantastical with the everyday, of a nature red in tooth and claw side by side with glimpses of nurture and protection. Helena is complex and her life has not been easy, you cannot help but want to know more about her. We come to understand the call of the wild is a representation of home. The Marsh King is not purely a figure of evil but a father who loves and is intimately connected with his daughter. The family, the roles and relationships within it, is often a can of worms exploited in fairytales and fiction, the author beautifully explores this territory. Cannot recommend this enough. Many thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC.

'The Marsh King's Daughter' is a modern riff on the Hans Christian Anderson story of the same name.
Here, the first person narrator is plunged into a thrilling story where her father-a child abductor-had escaped from prison,killing 2 guards and on the run .
The twist? The narrator's mother was the child kidnapped by her father and he was in prison because she put him there.
This was a kindly granted request by the publisher who provided a sample to review. Many thanks to them and Netgalley,cannot wait to hear the rest of her story!

Great book that I literally could not put down!
Thrilling, terrifying and had me at the edge of my seat. Can see this being a huge book in 2017.

I loved the plot, the beginning and the characters but I felt like this book moved too slowly. I got about halfway or so and it wasn't thrilling as I had anticipated. I will possibly try to finish it at a later date but for now, I'm having to put it down.

'The Marsh King’s Daughter' is an enthralling read. The pursuit of an escaped prisoner with a history of delirious intention is pretty suspenseful stuff, even more so when you place a family of innocents in his path.

Without a doubt this is Helena’s story, which she narrates candidly and without sensation – when the truth is as newsworthy as this there is no need for embellishment. The static emotion of her voice begged me to settle down to listen as she calmly recounts events of her life, including her parents’ surreal relationship, where her father kidnapped her mother and Helena was the result of that forced union.

To Helena her former life of twelve years was unremarkable as it was the only life she knew. The only remnants of her primitive upbringing are her social peculiarities that slip from time-to-time and the observations of her own children where she watches them interact in the big, wide world that was once alien to her. Yet her husband, her neighbours, and her children are not aware of her past. To them she’s a quirky character who sells preserves to the local market and often forgets the importance of time – nothing would suggest she is the daughter of the infamous Jacob Holbrook currently serving a sentence in a maximum security prison. At least he was until a radio bulletin alerted her to his dramatic escape.

At this point you can feel the cogs of her still unfamiliar new world grind to a breath-catching halt. What the hell are her unhinged father’s motives after thirteen long years in captivity? The pace intensifies as her immediate concern is to protect her family in the only way she knows. She assuredly practises the harsh life lessons her ‘Marsh King’ father taught her and embarks on a private manhunt, following the brutal trail he appears to have ‘gifted’ to her.

Each checkpoint on her eye-opening journey evokes scenes of the Holbrook family’s curious relationship in a wooden shack so isolated, all young Helena had to taunt her of what lay beyond the swamp were the yellowing pages of National Geographic magazines where so-called new discoveries had occurred decades ago. The evolving story line must be applauded as the past and the present blur and it’s impossible to tell who is hunting who.

This is an unflinching chronicle of remembrance through the indisputable honesty of the eyes of a child, which shows us everything even though she didn’t realise what she was witnessing at the time. While these hostile and unforgiving experiences would never be considered nostalgic to an outsider, they keep her grounded and help her to come to terms with something she can never escape - the earth-shattering truth that she will always be 'The Marsh King’s Daughter'.

When I read the synopsis of this book I was expecting something along the lines of Room or Baby Doll but what I got was something very different. Helena is the product of her mother's kidnap and rape by the infamous 'Marsh King' but rather than being imprisoned she is raised to be a tough hunter, unaware of her true origins until the age of 12. Now an adult she has to face up to her past when her father escapes from prison and makes a bid to reunite his former family.
The book is beautifully written, treading the line between Helena's adoration of her father and his casual cruelty perfectly. Her mother, the true victim, is incredibly convincing. There's no damaged but strong heroine about her, what she has been through has all but destroyed her. It is Helena who is the survivor, the strong empowered woman but can she survive this final showdown? It's a tense, engrossing read which I highly recommend.

Gripping and a real page turner. Will definitely look for this author in future.

This is the twisted version of that story mind - but the way it’s written captivates you as the fairy tales of yesteryear. There’s evil lurking and there’s a cabin in the woods and you just have to read to find out what happens next...

And it’s in the heart of those woods where evil and more come to play. Helena has an upbringing which is more at home in a very twisted fairy story. She has had the most unconventional of upbringings and now is the hunter, after her father who has escaped from prison. the twists in this are as delicious as that apple in Snow White - and we all know how that panned out!

The key to this novel was Helena and her relationship with both her mother and father. How she now sees the world and how she sees her place in it.

The mix of fairy story, that dark Grimm outlook for those trapped, claustrophobia and the genius of having nature and nuture set up for the battle of their lives makes this a crackling thriller which takes you into the heart of the wicked witch and what really went on in those woods..

I was hooked from the first chapter, and by just over half way knew I wasn't going to bed till I was done.
Helena is married with two young children, and unbeknown to them is the daughter of a kidnapper, rapist and murderer. She lived as a captive child till she was 12 when she and her mother finally escaped.
Her father, jailed 15 years ago for his crimes, has escaped. And only by tracking him, through the skills he taught her as a child, can she let go of the ghosts of her past. But he's tracking her too, and he's armed and dangerous.

This book reads like part modern day thriller, part biography.

Helena today is a family woman with a husband and two daughters, but even her husband has no idea of who the young Helena was, and what she went through before her transformation.

The young Helena was the daughter of the Marsh King. Her mother was his victim; she had been kidnapped as a teenager and held in the middle of the swamp lands of Michigan, where she was abused and kept captive, eventually giving birth to Helena.

Helena loved her father; he taught her to survive in the swamp, to track, to shoot, to use a knife and to fend for herself. But his love was tough love, vicious punishments were inflicted on Helena when she got things wrong. Even worse punishments were inflicted on her mother.

As she grows older Helena begins to realise her father and mother are not the only people in the world. The only knowledge she has of the world outside the swamp are some old Geographic magazines. She may be a good hunter gatherer, but she is very naive.

The young Helena had escaped the swamp and started to build a new life for herself. She stands out from other youths of her age. Her naivety is charming but her “its black or white” thinking leads her into a few scrapes with her new family and the community she lives in.

The book starts with Helena having a day out with her youngest daughter. Everything is going well until she turns the radio on. A killer has escaped from the local prison, it’s not just any killer, it’s the Marsh King, her Father.

She knows the only person that is going to be able to track him into the marsh is her, she knows his field craft, he taught her everything she knows………But did he teach her everything he knows.

The story switches between Helena today tracking her husband, and through this Helena’s memories, the story of the young Helena.

What a story it is. I hadn’t read a book like this 3 years ago. That’s because nobody in the UK writes psychological thrillers, or crime thrillers, set in the wilderness, or none that I’ve found.

The Kindle has opened a whole new world to me and two of my favourite authors now are C.J. Box and Greg Isles.

It’s time to add another name to my list Karen Dionne has written one of the best crime-psycho-thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s almost as if somebody has taken the best of Box and merged it with the best of Isles.

She describes life in the swamp so well, that in the evenings when I was reading it I could have been there.

Helena, her main character had me Loving her, hating her, empathising with her and just about every other feeling an author can take a reader to.

This is a great read, but stand by for a few bumps along the way when you read it