The Marsh King's Daughter

Starred review from April 3, 2017
Helena Pelletier, the narrator of Dionne’s (Freezing Point) exceptional hardcover debut, a psychological thriller, lives an ordinary life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—mother to five-year-old Iris and three-year-old Mari, wife to Stephen—but her childhood was not normal. Her mother was kidnapped at age 14 by Jacob Holbrook and taken to a remote cabin, where Helena was born three years later. When Helena was about 12, she and her mother escaped, their rescue making international headlines. No one, not even Stephen, knows her background, until Jacob escapes from prison after 13 years, killing two guards before disappearing into the woods less than 30 miles from the Pelletiers’ house. Knowing how he thinks, Helena is the only one who can find Jacob. Detailed flashbacks show Helena had an odd but decent childhood. To the world, Jacob was a monster; to Helena, he was just her father, who taught her to fish, hunt, and track, and told involving stories, and was occasionally brutal. Helena’s conflicting emotions about her father and her own identity elevate this powerful story. Author tour. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management.

April 1, 2017
The daughter of an escaped convict tracks her father through the wilderness while reflecting upon her childhood as his prisoner.When Helena Pelletier learns that notorious kidnapper, rapist, and murderer Jacob Holbrook (aka The Marsh King) is no longer in police custody, she panics; Jacob is Helena's dad, and 13 years ago she put him behind bars. Born and raised in a swamp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Helena didn't know that she and her mother were captives until they were rescued. Her new family knows nothing about her past, so when the cops show up at her house looking for leads, her husband, Stephen, is stunned. He packs the kids into the car and decamps to his parents' place in Green Bay, but Helena stays put, certain the authorities can't catch Jacob without her help. Helena's race to find The Marsh King is pulse-pounding stuff, but the bulk of the story comprises a string of loosely connected flashbacks to Helena's youth. Her conflicted feelings about Jacob ring true, but they also undercut tension, throttle pace, and de-fang the book's boogeyman. Dionne's (The Killing: Uncommon Denominator, 2014, etc.) efforts to tie her plot to the Hans Christian Andersen fable of the same name feel contrived and further disrupt the narrative drive. Dionne tries to strike a balance between psychological thriller and coming-of-age tale, but the end result feels more like an unsettling walk down Memory Lane.

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May 1, 2017
Helena and her mother are trapped in the swampy wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Their captor is Helena's father, Jacob, who kidnapped her mother when the mother was a teenager; Helena was born in the family's miserable cabin. Our heroine and her mother are not physically imprisoned, but Jacob's iron-clad rules and physical and mental abuse are chains enough. Over the course of the book, we see the girl increasingly disheartened with the only life she's known, outside of reading 50-year-old copies of National Geographic. A chance sighting of outsiders is the last straw. The book starts with Helena's new lifea current-day predicament has precipitated a look back at her captivityso it's no spoiler to reveal that she escapes, but the mystery of how she comes to do it will keep readers gripped until the end. Entwined in the story are many details of hunting and other subsistence ways of life that Helena's Ojibwa father has taught her. For fans of Emma Donoghue's Room and of novels with strong female leads.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2017

Taking its title from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale but set in the marshlands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, this thriller features Helena Pelletier, raised by an abusive father who had kidnapped her teenage mother. Now he's escaped from prison, and the adult Helena is the only person who can hunt him down through the marshes. Lots of bidding and rights sold to 20 countries so far.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017

Kidnapped at age 14, Helena's mother got pregnant and gave birth in a cabin in the marshlands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where she and her daughter were held prisoner for more than a decade. Over the years, Helena's violent and reclusive father taught her how to survive in the wilderness. Now that she's an adult and her father is in prison, Helena has built a new and safe life for herself. But when he escapes from prison, leaving behind him a trail of bodies, Helena knows she is the only person who can successfully track her father through Michigan's wilderness. VERDICT Echoing Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the same title, Dionne's (The Killing; Uncommon Denominator) latest is a well-crafted, eerie, and unnerving psychological thriller. With a strong setting and swift pacing, this novel is recommended for readers who enjoyed Emma Donoghue's Room and Travis Mulhauser's Sweetgirl.[ See Prepub Alert, 1/4/17.]--Emily Hamstra, Seattle

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 4, 2017
Helena Pelletier, Dionne’s title character, protagonist, and narrator, is living a happy, uneventful life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her husband and two young daughters when that tranquility is shattered by the news that an infamous murderer and child molester has escaped from a nearby prison. Reader Rankin captures all of Helena’s fearful concern as she explains that the escapee is her father, Jacob Holbrook, a monster who abducted her mother at age 14 and kept her and Helena captive in a cabin in the middle of an uncultivated, otherwise unpopulated marshland. Actor Rankin moves from present to past effortlessly, switching from the soft-voiced but strong-willed adult Helena, searching for her father, to the confused, troubled, yet adoring child of a mesmerizing madman. She also gives two versions of Jacob: In Helena’s memory, the wilderness man sounds powerful and omnipotent and cruel. Newly freed after over a decade of imprisonment, he’s croakier, wilier, and unpleasantly ingratiating. As the novel nears the moment when Helena discovers whether the smart but humane daughter can defeat her craftier sociopathic father, Rankin’s enactment revs up the tension. A Putnam hardcover.