Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Frankissstein

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

70 reviews

maiakobabe's review

dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

2.75

This book has three different story lines, one of which is much stronger than the other two, which is making it hard for me to figure out how I want to rate the book. The opening story line, and my favorite, is about Mary Shelley during the period in which she wrote Frankenstein. These scenes especially in the audiobook are beautifully read and atmospheric, damp, melancholy, introspective, with engaging characterizations of Byron, Percy Shelley, and the other guests of the house. The second story line is about Ry Shelley, a trans doctor living in post-Brexit Britain who becomes entangled romantically and criminally with Victor Stein, a researcher focused on AI, cryogenic preservation and reanimation, and training robots to detect human diseases. Ry is fairly genderfluid, and is often described as both a man and a woman, or a boy who is a girl who is a boy. I appreciated having a trans POV character in this book, but wished Ry had more of his own ambitions and plot- he seemed to exist primarily to have conversations and sex with Victor, who insisted over and over that he wasn't gay even after falling for and sleeping with Ry. Ry also interviews and then is repeatedly misgendered by Ron Lord, a Welsh entrepreneur in the sex robot industry- there is a lot in this book about sex bots, including huge chunks of uninterrupted dialogue by Ron Lord that got fairly repetitive in audio. Ry is also the victim of a bathroom sexual assault near the end of the book that felt thematically unnecessary and punishing. I can imagine a different version of this book where Ry was the one conducting the research that Victor does in this book, and his love interest is a modern version of Percy, which might have interested me more. There's also a third partial story line about Mary Shelley meeting a man named Victor Frankenstein who claims to be the character from her book; these didn't add anything for me. Would I recommend this? Hard to say. It's a complicated queer remix of Frankenstein and I was engaged while listening to the majority of it but there were also pieces that fell short of my expectations.

Content Warnings

bvic's review

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dark funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Started our great, drifted halfway and lost me completely at the end. Very strange, very funny, very beautifully written. Looking forward to reading Jeanette’s other work as I love the writing style, just not sure this story gave me enough in the end

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basil_touche's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

The Mary Shelley segments were the best parts of the book. It felt like a lot of research went into Shelley's history and the prose felt of the period. The Bedlam parts I didn't quite get though.

However, the modern parts, while they could be philosophical at times, treated the trans protaganist, Ry, abysmally. The

sexual assult

was gratuitous and did nothing to the narrative. It's just there to tell you how "miserable" being trans is. Having a trans protaganist in a reimagining of Frankenstein should be a match made in heaven, touching on themes of what humans can change of themselves, seeing ourselves in the creature in how he is viewed in ways that he's not, but here it just feels tacked on and not respectfully explored. Ry doesn't feel likely a fully realised character (the rest of the cast doesn't fare too well either) and is deadnamed and fetishised constantly. Doesn't help that it didn't keep my attention well either.

I can appreciate the novel's exploration of AI and what makes us human, but I feel like I can find a better book that covers the topic without the transphobia.

Content Warnings

balfies's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

This was weird. Like, properly twisted. Winterson is one of my favourite writers, so I always trust where she takes me. This was....

A modern retelling of Frankenstein wearing a coat made of transhuman, transgender, AI, sexbot feminist body horror sci-fi interleafed with Mary Shelley's own experiences of writing Frankenstein.

If you want a glimmer of queer macabre literary satire on what it means to be human and have a body, give it a go.

Personally, it's not my fave from old Jeanie baby, reminds me a bit of Ian McEwan's slightly trite retelling of Hamlet from the perspective of a foetus, though admittedly there is more craft in Frankissstein than there was in Nutshell.

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the_tridentarii's review

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

Content Warnings

rad_reads_123's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

Content Warnings

schizogleek's review against another edition

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

lily_peach's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I very much enjoyed parts of this book, and really did not enjoy others.

If Ry had been a nonbinary character, a lot of the things he said regarding his gender and his body would have made sense. As he is explicitly a trans man it instead came across as though the author does not see trans men as ‘real men’ and projected this onto Ry - I do not know a single binary trans person who would happily deadname themselves to strangers, call themselves ‘anatomically [their assigned gender at birth]’ or be happy with a partner who constantly invalidates their gender in the way Victor does.

There were moments that played around with gender in a way I thought was interesting (e.g. Ron constantly filp-flopping on whether or not Ry was a ‘real man’ based on completely arbitrary things) but not enough to save it imo.

A kind of enjoyable story, but I don’t think it really went anywhere. The ending was disappointing.

Also I felt that the sexual assault scene was entirely unwarranted and added very little to the plot. What was the point of it? To show that absolutely no one sees Ry as a ‘real man’? The transphobia of the other characters did that well enough.

All in all a clever concept and I very much enjoyed the writing style but I found it lacking.

Content Warnings

cormoth's review against another edition

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mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

marissab's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Content Warnings

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