I picked up The Alchemist's Daughter, Katharine McMahon's fourth novel and her first to be published in the United States, very much expecting to like it. After all, it was just my kind of book. Set in the early eighteenth century, it is the story of a young woman, Emilie Selden, raised in near seclusion by her father and trained to help him and eventually to carry on his work in natural philosophy and, above all, alchemy. On top of this was the promise of love, passion, betrayal and a secret from the past. What studious young woman could possibly resist?

Unfortunately, even from the first few pages, McMahon's novel, which is not without its merits, is something of a disappointment. The novel opens in the present tense, a ploy designed to give the protagonist's world a magical, almost enchanted quality, but McMahon's prose is too clumsy to pull off such a feat. In one passage she writes:

I must not break things. I must not say anything foolish. I must not forget what I have already be taught. I must not ask stupid questions. Above all, I mustn't cry. If I do any of these things, my father will be angry, and then he doesn't speak.

It is this last phrase, this awkward shift of tense, which throws the whole thing off. Instead of being able to focus on Emilie's reverent but cautious relationship with her father, we are jolted from her world and into a sudden consciousness of language and the dangers of poorly edited prose. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Another passage reads:

A word committed to paper was regarded as a little explosion of energy. I had access to the notebooks on plants, minerals, and alchemy, but not to the Emilie Notebooks, which he wrote after I had gone to bed and were kept locked away in a hiding place I never saw and therefore haunted me with their ghostly authority.

When we are done parsing McMahon's sentence and figuring out where the missing which's should be and that the notebooks are in fact the subject of all of the subordinate clauses at the end, we could probably care less about Emilie and her father's silly notebooks.

However, the novel's flaws do not end here. Even when there is nothing syntactically wrong or unsettling, McMahon's prose has a tendency to not quite ring true.

A shaft of sunshine warms my wrist and I think about heat. Is it a state or a substance? How is it passed from one object, the sun, to another, my arm? The wind stirs the leaves. There is movement in the air. The air moves. Air is not a state but a substance.

Understand, I am not above contemplating algebraic topology over my morning bagel, but even I find such a train of thought implausible. There is something missing here, so that, instead of thinking, "Isn't that interesting?" we feel instead a strong urge to say, "Yeah, right."

Often, the problem is that McMahon's allusions to math and science read like placards from the British Museum rather than the thoughts of a mind actively engaged in science. In describing her feelings towards the man she has fallen in love with, McMahon has Emilie say:

I was much too shy to ask Aislabie about himself. He was a novelty, from the fine cloth of his coat to the texture of his wig. I saw him as a perfect equation, like Kepler's third law of celestial harmony, which states the proportion between the time taken for a planet to orbit the sun and its distance from the sun.

Suddenly, almost without warning, we have gone from the raptures of first love to something from my Physics 15a formula sheet. It is not so much the allusion to Kepler that is out of place; Emilie has grown up in a world of science, it is what she loves, and it is natural for her to seek and find her conception of beauty and perfection there. What makes the passage feel so wrong is that McMahon's cool, textbook-like explanation contains none of this wonder and reverence.

However, many aspects of the novel, both in the writing and the plot, do work quite well. At times, McMahon's prose is gentle and touching.

I visit various cells putting new facts in order, sorting and tidying away the phlogiston theory. I still haven't developed any symptoms of the smallpox, but then it is only eight days since the engrafting. I remember my father's hand on my wrist and I smile.

There is nothing unnatural here, no artifice, just a young woman we have no trouble taking as real. There are many other passages such as this to be found in the novel, more difficult to locate and single out than those that do not work, for the simple reason that one of the true markers of good prose is that, in its effortlessness, we are lulled into no longer paying much attention to the particular words and phrases.

Further, it cannot be denied that McMahon's is an engaging and at times gripping tale. In the second half of the book, the tension and momentum of the plot take over so that the reader is more likely to overlook or forgive the shortcomings of the prose. In particular, the scenes between Emilie and Thomas Shales, the local rector, and the chapter in which she reads the "Emilie Notebooks," the notebooks her father has kept all through her childhood and adolescence as a record of her growth and upbringing, are, if nothing else, extremely compelling.

Quite apart from the momentum gained through the tensions of the plot, there is one passage which particularly stands out. Walking through the London streets, lost, Emilie finds herself in a poor and dirty quarter of the city.

I stumbled down yet one more alley and found that I had reached a dead end with rubbish piled against a high gray wall. The only way was back, though I dreaded the contemptuous eyes of the street children who sat on the steps and watched. The rubbish heap was made of rags, dirt, and bits of brick and metal soaked in the flyblown mess of emptied privies. Something caught my eye, a purple triangle sticking out of the waste.... Now the terrible thing took shape. What I had seen was the heel of a newborn babe flung face down in the rubbish, and on top of it, so that their two knees were locked together, the baby's twin.

It is not an image I am likely to be able to get out of my head anytime soon, if at all. The subsequent scene, in which Emilie takes the two infants back to her own house in Hanover Square in a desperate attempt to save them, is as devastating as it is gruesome.

Still, in the final reckoning, The Alchemist's Daughter is far weaker and less satisfying than one might wish. While the end does have a nice symmetry and a lovely glimmer of hope, the secret which Emilie discovers in her father's notebooks is a common fictional ploy, rather than the unexpected revelation that could possibly have propelled the novel into the realm of the original. Nevertheless, it is a fun book, and an engaging one, and a reader somewhat less particular than I, one who does not expect each book to be the next Embers or An Instance of the Fingerpost, would probably find in it a pleasant afternoon's diversion.

Sara Kate Heukerott believes that everyone ought to read Strunk & White and to follow it in all things, with the exception of the Oxford comma; she simply cannot abide the Oxford comma.