Emily Porter had her memory erased in an experimental procedure—and doesn’t know why. When danger shows up on her doorstep, she must flee to Croatia and put together her astonishing past.

The Progeny: A Novel – Tosca Lee, 2016.    3.5/5

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At just twenty-one years old, Emily has started a quiet new life in middle-of-nowhere Maine tying fishing lures. But subconsciously, the life she rejected is trying to tell her something.

A man named Rolan informs her she’s not Emily, her real name is Audra, and she is a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory. (You horror fans know her: The blood countess? The one who supposedly killed all those serving girls, bathed in their blood, and was walled up in a room in her castle for three years before she died? That one.) As Bathory’s descendant, Audra has special powers of persuasion. She is one of “the Progeny.” Rolan informs Audra that she is being hunted by an assassin from the Scions of the Dispossessed whose mission is to eradicate all of Bathory’s kin. Audra is soon on the run with Rolan from another (handsome, younger man) named Luka. But maybe Rolan isn’t so trustworthy. Maybe Luka is. Maybe they both are, or aren’t. Audra must tease out complicated loyalites; navigate the masked underground courts of Nikola, the Prince of Budapest, and Tibor, the Zagreb Prince; discover who killed her mother, a Progeny activist; unmask a conspiracy; save her new/old friends and her new/old beloved; and prove Bathory’s innocence. I think. Most of that, anyway. I lost track.

I went into this novel with great anticipation. I’ve enjoyed other works by Lee, especially her apocalyptic novel, A Line Between (see my review here), and her historical fiction titles like The Legend of Sheba. Good stuff. The Progeny is well-written: the pacing is great, there is plenty of action, the historical mystery is intriguing, and Lee weaves in a sensitive and probably (to other people) touching theme about motherhood. I was captivated by Lee’s dark vision of the fantastical, frenetic Progeny raves.

But I couldn’t get into the plot. The fault is largely mine: I have a strong aversion to amnesia and amnesia-like memory loss stories. I find them frustrating instead of suspenseful. Borderline infuriating, actually. I dislike feeling led by the nose by a plot device. In all stories, the author chooses when and how to dole out bits and pieces of info, but in memory loss stories the mechanics feel too transparent. (I have weird issues with time travel, too, but that’s another story.) Granted, Lee focuses on Audra’s journey in the present, but it still did not engage me. It also didn’t help that I found Audra largely unlikeable. Yes, Audra is stressed, doesn’t know who she is or was, and doesn’t trust anybody—these things would make anyone prickly—but they make her hard to connect with. For the bulk of the novel, she also doesn’t have a lot of empathy for any of the new/old people she’s meeting. Consequentially, I did not care much about the elaborate Progeny conspiracy. As I said, it’s mostly just me. Fans of Lee’s writing in general will not be disappointed (unless they share my bizarre issues with memory loss stories). This is the first in the Descendants of the House of Bathory series and is followed by Firstborn (2017). As much as I hate to leave a series hanging, I’ll be skipping Firstborn.