calstar 's review for:

The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

3.0

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This was good. Different than many thrillers I have read. It really felt more like a memoir than a thriller. The"thriller" aspects of it were really just a hunt that, to me anyway, had a pretty foregone conclusion. You knew what was going to happen pretty much from the beginning. The most interesting parts of the story were the flashbacks. ***Semi-Spoiler*** I felt like the stories the narrator told gave every impression that her dad was a narcissistic psychopath. She talks about her love for him and his for her but towards the end, she gave her dad chances to hurt or kill her or her family that I found hard to buy. I guess it would have cut the book pretty short if she shot her dad on sight but that was clearly what she needed to do and in the end, she had to do that. I felt like she should have known better and the idea that she was going to capture him and return him to prison was absurd. That said, the psychology of growing up captive with no other humans besides a psychopathic, controlling father and a broken, emotionally destroyed mother is not something I can claim to understand. The book did a good job of trying to justify the narrator's unending love for her father.