The Alchemist's Daughter
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15
Ratings1
Average rating3
There are long-held secrets at the manor house in Buckinghamshire, England, where Emilie Selden has been raised in near isolation by her father. A student of Isaac Newton, John Selden believes he can turn his daughter into a brilliant natural philosopher and alchemist. Secluded in their ancient house, with only two servants for company, he fills Emilie with knowledge and records her progress obsessively.In the spring of 1725, father and daughter begin their most daring alchemical experiment to date--they will attempt to breathe life into dead matter. But their work is interrupted by the arrival of two strangers: one a researcher, the other a dazzling young merchant. During the course of a sultry August, while her father is away, Emilie experiences the passion of first love. Listening to her heart rather than her head, she makes a choice.Banished to London and plunged headlong into a society that is both glamorous and ruthless, Emilie discovers that for all her extraordinary education she has no insight into the workings of the human heart. When she tries to return to the world of books and study, she instead unravels a shocking secret that sets her on her true journey to enlightenment.The Alchemist's Daughter is a gripping, evocative tale. Set against the backdrop of eighteenth-century London society, it is an unforgettable story of one woman's journey through a world of mystery, passion, and obsession.Selden Manor was the crucible in which my father, the Gills, and I lived together. I peer into it now with the respectful caution with which I was taught to approach any volatile experiment. I am searching for a day to illustrate our life before 1725, the year when everything changed. And unlike the blacksmith's daughter, I am an expert in observation. I know what I am looking for--bubbles of gas, a rise in temperature, an alteration in texture--small indications of chemical change that mean something significant is happening. --from The Alchemist's Daughter From the Hardcover edition.
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Entertaining book with lots of historical/scientific detail, which I really enjoy in historical fiction. Emilie, the protagonist, is raised as an experiment in nature vs nurture by her father, a widowed natural philosopher/alchemist outside London in the 1700s. Told from Emilie's point of view, the story follows her carefully controlled upbringing focused on complete immersion in an atmosphere of learning, science and the experimental method. The main subject of the father/daughter reasearch team is into the nature and composition of fire and air, but the father is also using alchemy in hopes of finding a way to bring dead objects back to life.Despite her father's strict attention to the experiment, Emilie fails to live up to her father's expectations once she is introduced to the world and the variety of people in it. But, Emilie ends up growing a great deal after several “real-life” dilemmas and disasters force her to change her self-centeredness and have more realistic assumptions about human nature.Predictability of the plot and too much focus on the romantic and morality themes keep this book from having a stonger response from me. The narrator for this book, [a:Justine Eyre 1144378 Justine Eyre http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], was an excellent choice for the voice of Emilie. Her narration fit the book's atmosphere without being a distraction.
