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.

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.