Review: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE ALCHEMIST’S DAUGHTER by Theodora Goss (2017)

Rating: 4/5 stars
Genre: Adult fantasy
Year Release: 2017
Source: Library audiobook

Listened to the audiobook

Do you like mash-ups of gothic horror like Penny Dreadful but wish it had the camp of the Robert Downey Junior Sherlock Holmes and starred an all-female cast? Look no further. The Athena Club consists of the daughters of monstrous scientists teaming up to solve murders in White Chapel.

The remix and reconstruction of classic tales like Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde were absolutely spot-on. This book serves more as an introduction to our five main heroines. The original stories had been updated enough to fit a new narrative, but familiar enough to even feed where the mystery was going. Goss clearly had much fun in crafting the world, with its secret societies and monstrous experiments, and that enthusiasm carries from the first page until the very end.

London is particularly gloomy in these installments, and Goss has such a handle on the atmosphere. This tome simply felt like it came out of a different time, right down to the dialogue choices, and it worked so wonderfully. I cannot wait to venture beyond England to follow the next excursion of The Athena Club.

Perfect for people who love cross-over novels and who have a special fondness for the Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law Sherlock Holmes films.

 

 

One thought on “Review: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE ALCHEMIST’S DAUGHTER by Theodora Goss (2017)

  1. Pingback: March 2020 Reading Recap | Jo Writes Fantasy

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s