Two of the items on the Book Riot Reading Challenge are to read a classic and a retelling of a classic. After hearing about The Madman’s Daughter from BooksandQuills, I decided to read it and its classic equivalent, The Island of Doctor Moreau.
I really enjoy sci-fi/horror novels from the 19th century. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I am here for this. The Island of Doctor Moreau follows in a similar vein. A man is afloat on a dinghy and is rescued by a man named Montgomery who is going back to this mysterious island. When they get back to the island, Prendrick realizes it is the island of Dr. Moreau, a scientist who was driven out of England after experimenting with vivisection.
The book explores many of the same themes as Frankenstein — humans playing God, ethics, and what lines science should not cross. Objectively, this book is a fascinating study of these subjects particularly considering the amount of scientific study still conducting on animals who are unable to consent. From a subjective standpoint, this book was a little too grotesque and a little repetitive for me.
The Madman’s Daughter is sort of a retelling of the classic, but from the point of view of Dr. Moreau’s daughter Juliet. She has been living in London under the shadow of the scandal her father caused. She decides to find him, and finds Montgomery in a London inn. He agrees to take her to the Island with him. When she gets to the Island, she is horrified to find out that the scandal was true, and her father is rather cruel.
The Madman’s Daughter has a really great gothic atmosphere. Without even being told, you can see the fog in London as she’s running through the night and the dark corners of the Island. There’s also a feminism in this retelling, where Juliet picked up medical knowledge from having a doctor father and working in the hospital, but repeatedly being told she is good only for marriage and needlepoint. There’s also a really badass moment with a would-be rapist that shows what happened to women who were lower-class and spurned the advances of men.
This book was a bit of a let down, though, because of how much time and focus is spent on a poorly-written love triangle. The rest of the book is well written and plotted, so it almost feels like an editor made the author add the love triangle after the fact.
It was really interesting to read these back-to-back, since one was written during the original gothic era and one is in the gothic-style, but written in modern day. The way that Juliet rebelled against the strictures of Victorian womanhood is much more explicit than it would have been, had it been written a hundred years ago, and added an extra element into the moral questions of the original text.
There are two more books in the Madman’s Daughter trilogy. I haven’t decided whether I will finish the trilogy, but reading these companion novels was definitely an interesting literary exercise.
ErinKwed 