Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

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The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

15 reviews

geekmom's review against another edition

adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.25

This was a fun idea with lots of potential, but I ended up struggling with it. The characters needed more fleshing out - perhaps there were too many of them. They felt flat and one dimensional. The character of Diana in particular needed a lot more work - she’s supposedly 14 but acts like she’s about seven, and also talks like a wisecracking sidekick from an American animated children’s movie. She really didn’t work for me.

Speaking of language…after struggling recently with Olivia Atwater’s delightful book ideas that were so let down by getting the “Regency” language badly wrong, I am so disappointed to find another writer who has clearly taken the time to carefully research the setting and time within which her novel is set but has not addressed the rather important problem of having her characters talk like people from that place and time. So in this book I’m reading about English people (mainly Londoners) in the 19th century— they should not be speaking a weird mixture of modern American English and of the way Americans might imagine English people spoke in the past. I tried hard to get past this issue but, seriously, as just one example— in London in the late 1800s the word “pants” did not mean what it means to a 21st century American reader. And we have plenty of written sources to tell us how Sherlock Holmes spoke - I’m not able to check right now but I’m going to hazard a guess that he rarely if ever used the word “gotten”… How hard would it have been to ask someone familiar with English dialects and the particular way English would have been spoken by people from various social classes at that time to review the manuscript and help fix this? This book would have been great if Goss and her editors could have made the language work; instead I was constantly being jolted out of the world of the book by misplaced and misused words, and I had to work to finish it. I wonder what the editors and publishers were thinking. I’m forced to conclude that they don’t expect their readers to be familiar enough with the source material and setting that inspired this novel to notice or care about this issue, which is a really depressing conclusion given that one would hope this book would motivate readers to go out and read Holmes and the wonderful early speculative fiction that inspired Goss to write this book.

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gabi_tron's review against another edition

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adventurous dark lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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the_games_a_foot's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious relaxing fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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froyobaggns's review against another edition

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adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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anni_swanilda's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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ijustreallyliketrees's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I enjoyed the story for the most part but wasn't keen on the characters constantly interrupting the story and by the time I got to the end chapters I was skimming the words instead of properly reading. Not for me.

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