The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Synopsis: The daughters of Victorian-era SF heroes and villains band together to solve a mystery.
Book Review: This novel hits you with its cool twist right in the epigraph – the story is being told by the protagonist, who is typing it out while her friends are watching, and their comments as she’s telling of their exploits are included in the text. It’s a delightful conceit! Feels a bit “Series of Unfortunate Events”-ish, in that the author/narrator is an active part of the story. This gives it a very conversational feel, like your friends are all sitting in the room with you and telling the story at once, butting in to interrupt each other.
It’s used to great effect several times, where one of the supporting characters complains about something, or protests how they are portrayed, only to have the author immediately change things within the novel to aggravate them even more to teach them a lesson. It’s fantastically fun!
In addition, it’s really cool being introduce to most of the characters through their commentary, and then meeting them in the narration as the story is related and saying “Oh! *THAT’S* who Justine is!! Neat!”
I also enjoyed the re-imagining of so many old characters, from Jekyll/Hyde through Sherlock, mostly seen through the eyes of their daughters. They spend the novel basically cleaning up the mess their fathers have left behind, and it’s a fun romp. Also, Diane is amaaaaazing. If you like stabby tom-boy characters (like Arya!) you’ll really enjoy her. She’s fantastic, and hilarious. Shortest daughter is best daughter!
On the downsides, the book isn’t very deep. It feels very much like the pilot episode of a series, where all the characters are introduced, but there are no character arcs and the plot isn’t terribly relevant; presumably because it’s basically setting things up for later. It’s also an ensemble piece, and each character is focused so strongly on being unique that they start to feel a bit single-note. Their strongest character trait is stressed over and over.
In the same way, there’s a number of things that are repeated ad nauseum, just to make sure we reaaaaaaaally get it. Yes, the crazy man is innocent despite his guilt admission, WE GET IT. It makes everyone in the story look like idiots because they keep saying “Wow, it’s so unbelievable that this gentle, weak, harmless, disconnected from reality old man could murder someone! But I guess he admitted it, so there’s just no way he isn’t guilty! So weird!” auuuuugh.
Similarly, there’s a few times very important things are ignored by characters just so they can be revisited later. Like, hey, if the girl I just rescued from an orphanage keeps calling me “sister,” maybe I should ask her why, instead of putting it off until after tea, and lunch, and dinner, and a good night’s sleep, and breakfast the next morning?
And the interjections don’t do nearly as much in the later half of the book. Most of the cool narrative jostling is in the first half, which made me sad, I would have enjoyed seeing more structure play.
This is a light, fast read, and fairly enjoyable. But it’s a set up for a longer series, and doesn’t have any weight to it. I get the feeling it’ll be popular, because it is fun and inconsequential, and lots of times that’s what people want in their pleasure reading. But for me, Not Recommended.
Book Club Review: I was surprised by how much there was to discuss. This hits the sweet spot of having a bunch of cool things that people liked, and a bunch of little irritating things that people had opinions on and could dig into for a fair bit. We ended up chatting for quite a while about this! The fact that it’s fanfic of SF classics that everyone is familiar with also really helped. There were some strong opinions on some of the portrayals. :) And that sparked further conversation about the nature of transformative works, as well as opinions on bringing modern sensibilities and language into old stories.
It also made me despair for American copyright law again. This is the sort of thing we are stealing from the current generation with our ridiculous restrictions.
Anyway, this made for some great talk, and it’s not a hard read! I’d use it as a break between heavier stuff, but yes – Recommended.
