The Marsh King's Daughter

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

I received the Marsh King's Daughter as an advance copy in return for an honest review - what a treat it was! The story follows Helena, the titular Marsh King's daughter whose mother was kidnapped when she was only 14 by a vile sadistic captor who feels it is his right to take her as his wife by force and this results in the conception of Helena following rape. Helena grows up in isolation in the upper peninsula marshlands not knowing of the circumstances behind her birth and her parents lives. This is the first book I've read by this author and I was really impressed by the writing and characterizations which are all warm, accomplished and evocative. The author has crafted wonderful, thrilling, chilling tale that transported me to the Marshlands making me forget I was in the UK. Read it people - it's a Corker.

Exceptional! Hands down one of THE best books of any genre this year! Gripping read that had me hooked from the very first page. I look forward to reading more from this author in the future!

gripping, page turning, keep-you-awake-at -night good! I recommend this for everyone, it's so good

,A wonderful thrilling, scary, fantastical read. I cannot fault it, I captivated from start to finish

This was a gripping read, I will be honest and thought was going to be a run of the mill abduction/rescue but it was much more than that, this is a page turning psychological thriller.
I admired Helena's courage and stamina while enjoying her innocence.

Brilliant book! Having read Room about the child who was born in captivity, this is the other side of it ...what happens when that child is free and becomes an adult. The book is so well written and had me gripped from the start. I found some of it very hard to read, and I admit to skipping a few chapters. The complexity of a father who was torn between what he was, and what he had become and the different way in which he treated the mother of his child, versus his own child. The need for him to prove to himself, and to his child, that she was every bit as good as he had ever been. The constant drive to challenge her, beyond what you would expect. And her love for him, and her hate for him. Clever book, I really enjoyed it.

I’m busy getting ahead of myself on reading (who can resist 2017 so far, not me that’s for sure) so this is a bit of an early review but trust me I’ll be talking about this one again nearer to the publication date – having finished it late last night though I can’t resist saying a few words now.

Talk about addictive quality – this book has that in spades and then some, once I started I could barely put it down, if it wasn’t for the fact that I kind of need to keep my job I would have dumped everything in favour of doing this in one sitting – Karen Dionne weaves a beautifully intense story here, with a strong and unique character voice and a twisted fairy tale vibe that is utterly gripping.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is both pacy and considered in its construction – Helena and her unconventional upbringing form the heart of the story, the emotional core, whilst in the present day we are treated to a thrilling hunt through the wilderness as Helena tracks her Father determined to return him to his jail cell. The two strands of the story, all seen through Helena’s eyes, are both totally compelling whilst the descriptively alluring setting comes alive in the telling.

The soul of this one is in the father/daughter relationship – and indeed the blurred lines of Helena’s relationship with her mother – divisive and fascinating, I loved how the author made it all so real and unpredictable. Helena, after all, has a different worldly view, nature AND nurture – watching her come to terms with the realities of her situation, wondering and deciding who she is going to be, creates a strong bond between reader and novel that is intriguingly irresistible.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is, put simply, an exquisite page turner.

Highly Recommended.

This is a beautifully written story. Helena was born whilst her mother, still a teenager, was in captivity after being kidnapped. The main story is set 12 years after the two of them escaped. Helena has done all she can to rid herself of the associations from that time, even to the point of not telling hr husband about her life in captivity. However, now her father has escaped from jail she must face up to her past and seek to find where her father is before he finds her family.

In between the present day story we read the story of Helena in captivity and see the love she has for her father; how he is her hero and how her life doesn't seem extraordinary at all to her. It is all she has known.

This is a really well written story which doesn't focus so much on the crimes committed but on the people involved and their responses to the situations they are in.

'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.

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.