The Boatman’s Daughter: Novel Review
Whew, well lookie here. If it ain’t a book review. How long has it been?
The Author
Andy Davidson is a Bram Stoker Award nominated author of horror. His works include In the Valley of the Sun and The Boatman’s Daughter. The Boatman’s Daughter has been listed among NPR’s Best Books of 2020, the New York Public Library’s Best Adult Books of the Year, and Library Journal‘s Best Horror of 2020. His upcoming novel, The Hollow Kind, is set to release in October of 2022.
The Book
“Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm. But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life. And when the preacher makes an unthinkable demand, it sets Miranda on a desperate, dangerous path, forcing her to consider what she is willing to sacrifice to keep her loved ones safe.”
Released February 11, 2020, The Boatman’s Daughter is about a young woman named Miranda Crabtree, who works as a drug runner for a deranged preacher named Billy Cotton and the sheriff. Set in the humid South, Miranda gets caught up in the preacher’s madness as he grows obsessed with joining his dead wife.
The Review
“Ample bloodshed is offset by beautiful prose . . . A stunning supernatural Southern Gothic.”
This book hit hard! It starts off with a vivid and heartbreaking scene, out in the swamps, before jumping forward to a present haunted by corruption both human and environmental, physical and psychological. This book swept me away. The suspense was as heavy as the atmosphere, the prose as beautiful as the winding rivers, the horror as gut-wrenching as the struggles of Miranda against the men in the town who want to control her.
I started reading and was ripped by the book’s inner riptide (I could continue making so, so many more flood and river puns here.) This is definitely not a novel to be missed!
The characters really drive the tale, providing depth and compassion, tension and despair, as they struggle against each other, the elements, and themselves. Following that, the setting itself closes in around you, choking you, and driving up the feeling that something will go wrong at any time. There is also a surprising supernatural element to it.
Essentially, I could not put The Boatman’s Daughter down, at all. And I would highly recommend this for fans of heavy Gothic horror.
9/10
x PLM
