The Madman's Daughter by Megan Shepard

Title: The Madman's Daughter (The Madman's Daughter #1)

Author: Megan Shepard

Date Read: December 29th, 2017
Published: January 29th 2013 @ Balzer + Bray
Genre: YA Horror/Historical Fiction

Rating: ⭐⭐

"Dead flesh and sharpened scalpels didn't bother me. I was my father's daughter, after all. My nightmares were made of darker things."

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I'm really disappointed that I ended up disliking Megan Shepard's reimagining of Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. This book had a lot of promise for me initially because I love gothic thrillers and I really enjoyed the first few chapters, which featured a strong but morally ambiguous girl who grapples with being a proper woman in society and feeding her animal instincts, but following that, I just... couldn’t. 

There were two nails in the coffin, so to speak, for Juliet Moreau and I:

First, that I cannot stand repetitive writing. It’s like the author believes that in the page or two that Juliet and Montgomery were staring angstily at one another, I’ll have forgotten that she trusts him because they were childhood friends. And then, just in case I was confused, she trusts him. Because they were childhood friends. Oftentimes she didn’t even bother to adjust the phrasing, just literally repeated the same sentence three or four times. This can be compelling, in my opinion, when it ties into stream of consciousness, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Honestly it just strikes me as lazy writing. 

Secondly, I thought both love interests were insufferable. Everyone acted in such a way that it served the plot rather than characterization, and more often than not the plot consisted largely of their unconvincing romantic entangling. There really is no question at the novel's set-up that Montgomery's behaviour is dubious at the best of times, and that Edward has things to hide, but those tensions are only played up to the extent that it affects how much Juliet is attracted to them. I’m not opposed to romance in general (my favourite novel is, after all, a love story) but I don’t constitute pondering someone’s hotness a great conflict. 

I don’t know, I think YA is an interesting genre in that you can very clearly see from the tropes and the aesthetic choices that this story is a product of a very particular time in YA’s development. This feels like a story released in 2013, which can't always be said about other genres. That being said, that particular time in the Young Adult world doesn’t jive with me very well. I might one day pick up the sequel, but frankly, I doubt it.

xx May B.