The Doll Factory

Starred review from September 30, 2019
MacNeal’s lively debut finds a fresh way to dramatize the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of revolutionary, mid-19th-century British painters. In addition to William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, MacNeal creates a fictitious PRB member, Louis Frost, who meets Iris Whittle, the heroine, a painter of miniature faces at Mrs. Salter’s Doll Emporium. Dismissed for being a woman, Iris longs to be seen as a real painter, and when she meets Frost, he proposes a deal: if she poses for him, he will give her art lessons. At the same time, Iris also comes to the attention of Silas Reed, a taxidermist who sells stuffed animals to artists as props for their paintings. Unbeknownst to Iris, he stalks her with the intention of possessing her like an object
. Louis turns out to be a generous mentor and Iris ends up falling for him. Only Albie, a light-fingered street urchin befriended by Iris, is aware of how much danger she is in from the obsessed Silas. Told against the backdrop of the Great Exposition at the Crystal Palace and its industrial wonders, MacNeal’s consistently enjoyable novel reads like an art history lecture co-delivered by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and read from a revisionist feminist script. This debut is a blast; it enticingly vacillates between a realistic depiction of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s London and lurid Victorian drama.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
In London, 1850, porcelain-doll painter Iris' family disowns her for leaving the oppressive but respectable doll shop to become an artist's model. Her coworker and twin sister, Rose, deformed in her teens by smallpox, feels especially betrayed. Meanwhile, taxidermist and curiosity-shop owner Silas nurses an obsession for Iris and her own deformity, a bent collarbone. In the build-up to and shadow of the 1851 Great Exhibition and Royal Academy show, love grows between Iris and Pre-Raphaelite painter Louis; Iris tastes true freedom and determinedly pursues her own painting; and Silas finalizes plans for capturing his most prized specimen. Talented debut novelist Macneal drops readers right into a Victorian London that's home to stinking squalor and chaos, but also significant beauty and possibility. Midway through, readers won't know if they're holding a romance, tragedy, or murder mystery, but won't pause long enough to wonder about it as Iris rails against the limitations of her gender and social status, and Silas' creepiness comes into sharp focus. (There's also a marriage scandal, and a gold-hearted street urchin.) This terrifically exciting, chiaroscuro novel became an instant bestseller in England, with TV rights already sold, and will jolt, thrill, and bewitch U.S. readers, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)