I found this book to be disappointing and unpleasant. I feel bad saying this of a debut novel which won the 2018 Caledonia Award (an international competition for unpublished novels), but my reviews are always honest, so here goes…
But I’ll tell you what it’s about first. This historical novel focuses on Iris, a young woman who leaves her awful job in a dollmaking workshop to become an artist’s model. Her twin sister, Rose, disfigured by smallpox and bitter about everything, stays in the job while Iris lives a bohemian lifestyle with the (fictional) painter Louis Frost, part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Iris is friends with a kind urchin called Albie, who in turn runs errands for the obsessive collector Silas. Iris is in danger but she doesn’t know it…
Reading the blurb from the NetGalley website, I really thought this would be my kind of book. Victorian setting? Check. Pre-Raphaelites? Check. Hints of gothic thriller? Check. But what’s not mentioned is that Silas, the ‘baddie’ of the story, is a taxidermist, a fact that would have made me avoid reading it at all. I mean, there are descriptions of how he does his work. Not only this, there are incidents of cruelty to animals throughout the book but particularly towards the end. To me this seemed gratuitous and was upsetting to read. So… consider that a content warning.
There were other aspects of the novel that I also found disagreeable. Someone near the end of the story gets killed, who should have deserved a happier ending. I can’t see how it helped the story at all. Apart from this, there are no twists. It all goes along a predictable trajectory in the second half of the book. I feel that the author didn’t grab enough opportunities to surprise the reader. Meaning that this is not actually a thriller. The pacing is quite good, giving the novel a page-turning quality, but the story could have been so much better. It reminded me a lot of The Collector by John Fowles.
What I did like was the meaning of the ‘doll factory’ itself. It becomes a symbol for how women are viewed and portrayed by society as pretty, weak, fragile creatures with empty heads who are there to be used and abused at men’s will. Iris is a strong protagonist who wants to be a professional artist and escape the world of dolls.
The Doll Factory will be published by Picador on 2nd May. Thank you to the publisher Pan Macmillan for providing an advance reading copy via NetGalley.
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