Come See the Living Dryad by Theodora Goss

Come See the Living Dryad by Theodora Goss
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Suspense/Mystery, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (36 pages)
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“Come See the Living Dryad” by Theodora Goss is a fantasy about a contemporary woman investigating the murder of an ancestor suffering from a rare disease who was a famous sideshow attraction in the nineteenth century.

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The world building in this story was so complex and realistic that I ended up googling Daphne Merwin, the main character’s famous ancestor, to see if this was inspired by a real case. While I won’t share what I found in this review, I was amazed by the author’s vivid descriptions of both the past and the present. She did an incredible job of weaving them together and making this reader forget everything around me while I explored the mystery of what happened to Daphne and tried to determine if she was based on a real person.

Among other things, this was an incredibly compelling mystery. At first I couldn’t imagine how anyone could hope to solve a murder that happened well over a century before the protagonist began investigating it. All of the witnesses were dead, and the crime scene had of course been cleaned up a very long time ago. Seeing how Ms. Goss explored what had happened with these limitations was fasciating. I was quite impressed with all of the clues she managed to plant for the readers and characters to find.

One of my favorite parts of this book was discovering the identity of Daphne’s great-grandchild. For quite a while, the only thing the audience knew about that person was that they were a descendant of the Living Dryad. Everything else about them, including their gender and name, had to be teased out of the plot slowly as they investigated Daphne’s murder. It was so much fun to put all of the pieces together while also figuring out the mystery and how the science fiction genre influenced the plot as well.

I’d heartily recommend Come See the Living Dryad to anyone who loves history, speculative fiction, rare diseases, or mysteries.