Nikki Vallance's Reviews > The Doll Factory

I loved reading The Doll Factory with it's well drawn characters, sense of time and place. I could almost smell the stench in the streets and feel the crush of repressive ignorance in an era when freedom for a woman was a rarity indeed. The history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already familiar to me from the excellent BBC series, Desperate Romantics, has been delicately woven through the story. But it was the interactions between Iris and Silas, both imagined and real, which drove the story at the heart of this historical thriller forward. The sense of impending danger was compelling and I raced through the second half desperate to discover whose dreams might come true and whose were fated to shrivel and die in the fetid Victorian gutter.

A masterfully written tale with echos of Perfume by Patrick Suskind, I'd highly recommend this book for fans of historical fiction with strong stomachs.