I’m not sure how this got in my TBR list, but it looked pretty cool and I wanted a quick read so I decided to read it (it was indeed something you can read in one sitting).

Come See The Living Dryad is a novella about the murder of a ‘living dryad’, who is basically a woman with Lewandowsky–Lutz dysplasia, also known as Treeman syndrome. Her supposed murderer has been hanged since this case was a hundred years ago, but for reasons unknown, one of her descendants is investigating her murder.

The story is told mainly through two perspectives – the dryad and her descendent – with other materials like newspaper clippings interspersed through the story. I thought that Daphne Merwin, the dryad, was very sympathetically written and I really wanted to know more about her. I thought that the snippets of her life that we saw were tragic and interesting and I would have loved to know more about her childhood. Of her descendant, also named Daphne, I wasn’t as interested. In fact, I think that given the length of this book, the dual-narrative structure didn’t really work because I wasn’t really interested in the story of descendent Daphne.

The dual-narrative structure was also let down by the formatting of the book. I’m not sure if it’s my library copy (I got it from Overdrive) but there was very little to mark between sections and POVs. This meant that the changes felt very abrupt and that, coupled with the story length, meant that I didn’t have time to become very invested in the story. If this was all in the past with different narrative techniques (character POV and newspaper clippings), for example, I think I would have been drawn deeper into the story, since I’d be in one time frame and seeing things mainly through one character’s POV. Alternatively, if this was a full-length novel, I think I would have been able to ‘inhabit’ both worlds and enjoy the story more.

Overall, I quite liked this story, even though I wish it were longer or focused on only one time period. It does attempt to deal with a lot of issues, like exploitation of the less fortunate and living with a disfigurement, through the story but because of the length, doesn’t get to engage them as fully as the story could have.