The Alchemist's Daughter

I picked this one up because I'd heard good reviews of another of the author's works, but this was not a great book for me. The heroine was insipid and weak, and spoiled what seemed like a very interesting premise.

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.

This was a great book to read at the end of one decade and the beginning of another. I liked how gradually Emilie learns how her isolation has left her ignorant of not only the city life in London but how others perceive her.