308 pages
Published 2022
Read from May 9 to May 12
Rating: 4 out of 5
I haven’t read Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau since my teens. I’ve retained the book’s overall vibe and a vague recollection of its story beats, that’s about it. Unlike The War of the Worlds, Island wasn’t a formative book I read way too young and way too often. I enjoyed it, of course. It was merely another late Victorian novel that I read largely because my controlling father wouldn’t let me read much of anything newer than that.
I’m almost curious now to reread it, because Moreno-Garcia’s recontextualized retelling seamlessly makes use of the original’s characters and story beats, creating a cohesive new story that feels both a sharp commentary on Wells’ colonialist concerns of “racial degeneration,” and its own whole, unique fiction. Moreno-Garcia takes one of Wells’ plot points, the religion Dr. Moreau pushes on his hybrids, and turns it into an examination of how religion is employed to keep women meek and submissive, to keep poor laborers subservient, to keep the racial castes imposed upon society intact. Interweaving Wells’ outline with her own tale is a difficult balance that Moreno-Garcia makes look effortless.
As in Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia excels at evoking and sustaining atmosphere, this time in the limestone flats and cenotes of the Yucatán during the 1870s. Personally, I preferred the misty mountains of Gothic, which I felt to be a more absorbing book in general. But the difference isn’t enough to give Daughter a lower rating (all my ratings are utterly arbitrary and meaningless anyhow).
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