The Marsh King's Daughter

Karen Dionne

Fair warning: The marketing copy on this book undersells it. It looks like a thriller — and there is a thriller running underneath the plot. But it’s really about family and the high cost of love.

This story opens with a woman delivering homemade jam to a grocery store in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. You know those charming jars with gingham circles tied over the lids with butcher’s string. These particular jars are olor-coded by flavor: red for raspberry, purple for elderberry, green for cattail-blueberry. As she hauls boxes of jam, leaves her toddler buckled in the truck with the windows down. On the drive home, a news bulletin interrupts the quiet scene: An escaped prisoner, armed and dangerous, last seen near the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. Two guards are dead.

She already knows his name. Because he’s her father.

This woman — with the jam and a child — is Helena, born in captivity to a mother who was abducted. Helena was raised for the first twelve years of her life to believe that the cabin in the marsh — no electricity, no running water, no calendar, just her captive mother, her dangerous father, and the seasons — was normal life. Helena loves her father; the book keeps circling back to that. And it never once lets you off the hook for just how uncomfortable and devastating that is.

In alternating chapters, we see Helena in the present, married to a gentle nature photographer named Stephen. He doesn’t know who she really is. Together, they’re raising two little girls and selling jam at the farmers market under a name she assumed after her escape. In flashbacks — headed, ominously, ‘The Cabin’ — we see Helena’s childhood: learning to track animals, to skin a beaver, to clean a deer. Getting her first knife at five, an eight-inch Bowie, presented by her father as if at a knighting ceremony. Learning to shoot at six. A scene involving a hammer, her thumb, and a lesson about carelessness that will not be detailed here, but on the page, it’s worse than you might imagine. That scene sits just two pages from another, this one of the same man wrapping Helena in a blanket at midnight to assuage her fears of a sound in the yard. The author Karen Dionne refuses to let this dissonance end: He’s a monster, and he’s her father, and she loves him in a broken way.

Then that prison break happens, and the state police are soon on her porch. Her husband learns who he married. What Helena decides to do next — instead of running, instead of staying safely with her family — is the rest of the story.

What makes this book a Strong Sense of Place pick, though, is how well Dionne draws the Upper Peninsula — not as scenery, but as the backbone of the whole story. The Tahquamenon River basin, Sault Ste. Marie, wich locals call ‘the Soo,’ the Seney Stretch, twenty-five straight, flat, mind-numbing miles of M-28. Deer camp as a two-week regional holiday. The specific, seasonal knowledge of where the blackberries grow biggest, which wind a buck will bed down against, how cold has to get before the snow squeaks under your boots. Dionne isn’t writing ‘the wilderness’ in the abstract. She’s writing this particular 130 square miles, in enough detail that it feels like you colud field-dress a doe by the end of it.

In the 1970s, Karen Dionne, her husband, and their infant child lived in a canvas tent in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For three years, they functioned without a telephone or running water. It’s not hard to imagine that this is where the veracity of this book originates

This isn’t really a book about a manhunt, although that is a thrilling aspect of the story. It’s a book about what it costs to love someone who taught you everything you know, and then very nearly ruined you doing it. It’ll make you rethink the meaning of the word complicated. If you’re going to read it, start it on a night you don’t have anywhere else to be.

If I told you my mother’s name, you’d recognize it right away. My mother was famous, though she never wanted to be. Hers wasn’t the kind of fame anyone would wish for. Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Elizabeth Smart—that kind of thing, though my mother was none of them.

You’d recognize my mother’s name if I told it to you, and then you’d wonder — briefly, because the years when people cared about my mother are long gone, as she is — where is she now? And didn’t she have a daughter while she was missing? And whatever happened to the little girl?

But I won’t tell you my mother’s name. Because this isn’t her story. It’s mine. — Karen Dionne

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