The Madman's Daughter

Book Title: The Madman's Daughter

Author: Megan Shepherd

Series: The Madman's Daughter #1

Date Started: August 2nd 2018

Date Completed: August 3rd 2018

Genres: Romance, Historical, Mystery, Horror

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Stars

Final Rating: Five stars

Review:

I didn't finish reading The Madman's Daughter because wow, this was a car crash for me. Apparently I'm in the minority here, and that's fine. I'm glad some people enjoyed their time reading this book. I just definitely wasn't one of them.

To start with, nothing has enough establishment to be worth anything. We're given the context after the punchline so it doesn't have an impact. You're going to tell me oh! That's my old servant who I was really close to and think about everday, only I didn't tell you, reader, until he was standing right in front of me so I could have an excuse for fawning over him. It's not even like it's hard to go back a few pages in editing and mention a piece of information. As it is, the audience doesn't get to go through the story with the character because they don't know what they need to, they just sit there and get told things when the character feels like telling them.

And Juliet, for me, sounded like priviledged whining. Yes, she's had some horrible experiences and her fair share of misfortune, but you can't throw the sad orphan cliche into my face and expect me to immediately root for her. Oh, no I used to be rich but then I was left on the streets, but I was perfectly fine and managed to become a servant in a laboratory (which is obviously the worst place I could have found), but it's fine because my rich friend still takes me to all the lavish parties. Also I'm so naive and innocent, but I'm clever I'll have you know. I just choose to spend my time fawning over boys and doing nothing to drive my own story forward - see, I really have the worst of all lives, pity me, pity me.

(Do I think I was maybe harsh that description? A little. But do I think it has fair grounds? Yes. And did I have a lot of fun doing it? Absolutely.)

Apparently this is also a world in which teenagers has high school parties in the 1800s. Where girls who fought back managed to get away without being ostracised; where orphans were fine just being on the street; where boys weren't thinking about marriage at 19, and girls weren't being married off or betrothed in their teens. Alright, not all historical novels have to be absolutely faithful to their time period, but if you're doing a retelling of the gothic genre surely it's a time to try and replicate that tone the best you can?

And there are certainly some efforts to try and recreate the time period in the prose. Hell, I was uncomfortable with the way people of colour and those bearing disfigurment were talked about because it was trying to show the social attitudes at the time, I guess. I mean, admittedly, all the characters are flat as a pancake, but I still wasn't comfortable with the fact that you have the main cast and then an ensemble of natives with disfigurements, whose only qualities are that they're natives and they have disfigurements. (Maybe that changes later in the book, but by the halfway point it certainly hadn't shifted, and so much attnetion was being given to shoving a love triangle down your throat that I wasn't hopeful.) I also wasn't happy with the way sexual harrassment was dealt with. While I get the desire for representation and the opoprtunity to show girls fighting back, the whole world felt so unbelievable that it couldn't come across as anything more than ticking the 'tough issues' box. It's brushed off so casually, and doesn't seem to have repercussions, that I didn't feel like it was actually addressing the issue.

And goddamnit, why is there a love triangle? Why?! What is the purpose of it? There's basically no story other than the love triangle. Everything that happens is purely to create tension between the boys, or between Juliet's father and the boys, or give Juliet an excuse to get all personal and defensive of one of the boys. There are so many things that wouldn't logically happen, but do because the author wants the love triangle there and it's so damn frustrating. Have we not moved on from this? Have we not realised that protagonists that you put in love triangles end up coming across as selfish and mean any way you put it because they're leading two people on? There could've been a story here, but you could barely see it if there was.

There seems to be a misunderstanding of the gothic genre for torture-porn and brooding selfishness. There's so much more to it about relationships and how the way we manage the human experience affects those around us, but for me this book was a love triangle trying to be set in an Edgar Allen Poe meets Pretty Little Liars universe. Maybe that's your thing, in which case go crazy. I just think it was more concerned with appealing to specific genres than about telling a story.