Helena’s home is now like anyone else’s, with a husband and two daughters and a job she enjoys. But no one knows the truth about her childhood.
Brought up in a cabin in the wilderness until she was twelve, Helena’s father kept her and her mother isolated and unable to leave their marshland home, until the fateful day Helena escaped and her father faced justice.
Now years later and with news that he has escaped from prison, Helena instinctively knows that her father is coming for her and if she is to keep her family safe, she must once again return to the marsh, to confront him in the wilderness and become the Marsh King’s daughter once again.

 ‘The Marsh KIng’s Daughter‘ was a wonderful read. Ruthlessly consistent and startlingly original. Karen Dionne has an amazing control of the pace and tone of story. Emily Rankin’s narration amplified my enjoyment, making a great book even better. I can see why ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter‘ won the Barry Award for Best Novel (2018).

‘The Marsh King’s Daughter‘ was powerful, original and accessible It was a story filled with unpleasant truths that also managed to be a compelling thriller. I found it to be a deeply sad tale. A tragedy, dressed as a thriller. It had the edge-of-the-seat tension, a constant threat of explosive violence and a growing sense of doom that I I think are the marks of a good thriller but it wasn’t a story constructed only to thrill. It reached beyond the boundaries of the genre and became a novel about identity, choice and the ability and strengh to see things as they are.

The story is told entirely from the point of view of Helena, the Marsh King’s daughter, sharing her thoughts and feelings as she hunts down her ecaped convict father in the wilds of the marsh and her memories of her childhood, seen now through an adult understanding of who and what her father was. The clarity and depth of Helena’s understanding of the path of her life and the tangled mess of love, abuse, sadism and rivalry that characterise her relationship with her father are what gives the novel its emotional depth and make the final confrontation between them so powerful.

It was heartbreaking to watch Helena’s childhood unfold, to see how her violent, psychopathic, narcissistic father used punishment and reward to twist Helena’s love for him and her need for his respect to give him complete control over her while giving her the illusion of freedom. Raised in complete isolation, turned against her mother whom her father dominated and abused, Helena, worshipped her father like a god. ,What made these memories harder to bear was that, as an adult, Helena can see clearly what was done to her. It makes her angry. It does not make her into a victim. She accepts that she is who she is partly because of how she was raised, partly because she is her father’s daughter and partly, perhaps the most important part, because she escapedher father and made a life for herself.

What makes this novel stand out is that it is the story of the Marsh King’s Daughter rather than the story of the pursuit of the Marsh King. It is Helena, not her father, who dominates this novel. I found myself firmly engaged on her side from the first pages of the novel. From the beginning it was clear that Helena was more complicated than the ‘hunt your dangerous fugitive father’ set-up might suggest. This complexity makes her unpredictable which makes the novel more engaging. Helena is introspective and confident in her conclusions, which makes her interesting to listen to. 

Helena’s hunt for her father wassn’t just about tracking him down. It was about her reviewing how she came to be who she is and choosing who she will become. The mix of memory, reflection and action built a picture of who Helena really is. I liked that, years after being in the modern world, her view of herself and her actions is still based on the values she formed in her childhood, even though some of those values clash with the softer world she normally lives in, That seemed real to me.

I ended the novel with a deep sense of satisfaction that came partly from the release of the adrenaline that the thriller plot generated and partly from feeling that I’d made and understood Helena and believed the choices that she’d made.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’. Emily Rankin’s narration was excellent.It was just animated enough to breathe life into the text without any of the unnecessary emoting that could turn this into a melodrama. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.