Book blurb (from goodreads)Sixteen-year-old Juliet Moreau has built a life for herself in London—working as a maid, attending church on Sundays, and trying not to think about the scandal that ruined her life. After all, no one ever proved the rumors about her father's gruesome experiments. But when she learns he is alive and continuing his work on a remote tropical island, she is determined to find out if the accusations are true.
Accompanied by her father's handsome young assistant, Montgomery, and an enigmatic castaway, Edward—both of whom she is deeply drawn to—Juliet travels to the island, only to discover the depths of her father's madness: He has experimented on animals so that they resemble, speak, and behave as humans. And worse, one of the creatures has turned violent and is killing the island's inhabitants. Torn between horror and scientific curiosity, Juliet knows she must end her father's dangerous experiments and escape her jungle prison before it's too late. Yet as the island falls into chaos, she discovers the extent of her father's genius—and madness—in her own blood.
Inspired by H. G. Wells's classic The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Madman's Daughter is a dark and breathless Gothic thriller about the secrets we'll do anything to know and the truths we'll go to any lengths to protect.
My Review:
I love retellings of old books but I usually read retellings of fairy tales, such as books like the lunar chronicles which are retellings of Cinderella, red riding hood ect. When I saw this book, I had no idea what The Island of Dr. Moreau was so I did some research and found out that it was an old science fiction book published in 1896. It follows a young man that was ship wrecked and saved by a man called Montgomery. He aids him back to health and leads him back to his island where he meets the professor and Montgomery's master, Dr Moreau who's vivisection experiments have made him an outcast and these experiments have terrifying results...
The plot of this book is very clearly related to The Island of Dr. Moreau. The only thing missing would be Juliet and then we would practically almost have a identical book! Even though this book was so closely related to something else, the book was still it's own. Megan Shepherd had taken an idea from another book from long ago and twisted it slightly to make it a more modern and exciting plot whilst still playing around with the same concept than the original, power corrupts, no one should play the part of god, ect. Adding Juliet to the story rather than keeping her out to keep it closer to the original was a good idea. It added a lot of depth and conflict in the story between all of the characters. With every piece of new information that we collected along the way the plot continued to thicken and at parts become more confusing. Sometimes we were even given information that didn't seem big at the time such as descriptions of people and later on in the book it came back as something huge.
The characters in these books felt real. Juliet was having problems dealing with her fathers death so like any main character would have done went of with her childhood friend which she hasn't seen in something like ten years, Montgomery, to her fathers island. A man she thought to have been dead who has broken of all contact with her and everyone says is crazy and dangerous... *sigh*. And people wonder why characters always die in books? Apart from Juliet's obvious problems with smart decision making she was actually a sincere character. She always wanted what was best for everyone. However I think that the part of her that made her the most relatable was the fact that she was a little bit mad. Everyone is a little bit mad, I do not care how sane you think that you are. Someone out there is going to say that you are a little mad. I think that I think that Megan Shepherd portrayed Juliet's madness well, because even though she knew that her father was completely around the bend crazy, she was still proud of him and fascinated at what he had achieved. Montgomery was like a puzzle all throughout this book. He made it clear that he had feelings for Juliet at the beginning of the book but then he never acted out on them, which made me wonder how far Juliet's father's control went with him. We never really found that out in the book but I have a sneaky feeling that it has something to do with black mail. I always felt like when Montgomery was present in the book he was always distant, now if this had something to do with what he saw in the lab or something to do with Juliet, I do not know, but it made it harder to understand his character since it limited long conversations between him and others which is something that I would of like to see more of in this book. That was the only thing left that I needed to see before the book ended, but it never did happen. At least, not on the level that I was hoping for. I think that I just thought that I understood Edward but never really did. Especially not with what happened at the end with him... Like Montgomery he was distant as well in this book but we did get to see more of him since Juliet's father kept on trying to match them up together so he could send her away. We also found out that he had feelings for Juliet, so we get a love triangle which I am less than thrilled about.
I give this book 3 out of 5 stars:
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