Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - Our Hideous Progeny

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Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill

20 reviews

therebeckening's review

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adventurous dark medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.75

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sproutedpages's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Chronic illness representation:

Maise: migraines, asthma and lung issues, heart issues, history of childhood illness.
Mr. Jamsetjee: tremors (likely Parkinson's) referred to as “shaking palsy”.

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skywhales's review

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adventurous dark inspiring medium-paced

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

5.0

WHOO oh all sorts of feelings about this one man.

this came on the heels of the first book i dnfed in quite a while (which i won't review since i don't usually review books i dnf. principle of the thing or whatever) and so maybe i'm just spoiled by this book not being That book. but also ugh i loved this

this has gotta be one of my favorite frankenstein adaptations (if this counts as that). it takes a definitively unique spin on the whole "victorian scientist creating life" premise and delves deeper into the real life scientific societies of england at the time, which was really enjoyable to see. and god, i LOVED the creature. we need more frankendinosaurs right now immediately. charming, exciting and fun nearly all the way through.

i have this funny thought that these characters could have easily been in a less well written book and would have been a total mess. but they weren't and i'm very happy about that. it took me a little while to fully come around to mary since i am a little tired of one person automatically being the only morally upstanding person in the room at a time where a lot of backwards opinions were commonplace. but i found i could relate to her anger with the fucked up practices of her community, and yes, i continue to adore women of science. i also like that they specified her love for her child was different than her love for the creature and shot down the idea that she was basically using it to replace her kid because if they had compared the creature to her daughter i would have cringed SO hard. honestly i feel like the author did a good job writing a character who isn't really typically motherly and wants to exist as a person outside of that. and while losing her child is always going to affect her, there was a lot going on with her that didn't have anything to do with that.

maisie was so sweetiepie...the sort of character i'm so glad was allowed to be a love interest. she's allowed to be less physically strong and be chronically ill but at the same time she's so full of life and perky and multifaceted and lovely...also sapphic stories where the love interest is the more feminine one always make me jump up in the air for joy. though i know it's victorian times and there's a base standard of femininity for both of them but you get what i am saying. you understand. henry was AUGH! it's so crazy because like. most of the time when a character has a crappy husband it kind of smacks you over the head with it but henry was maybe one of the most realistically flawed of these kinds of characters i've seen and it legitimately took me by surprise. a lot of his banter with mary was genuinely sweet! i could genuinely see that at one time there was love there! and there still was and still might be but those flaws begin to become less and less charming as mary becomes more and more disillusioned. he also got a lot worse whenever clarke entered the picture which i also appreciated even as it pissed me off because it's true that a lot of men who are otherwise somewhat decent people can easily go downhill when surrounded by an echo chamber of way worse friends. speaking of clarke i wanted to shred him into little bits so that characterization did its job.

if i had a qualm with the book i'd say that it does -sometimes- seem to kind of reinforce the idea that men are the ones thinking of Logic and Facts and women are the ones guided by Emotions. a lot of choices mary made were spur of the moment emotional ones that ended up just making everything worse but also i'm realizing even as i write this that it makes me sound like a major asshole. maybe i'm just too used to baru-type characters who make awful decisions in a different way. and overall i did understand her anger in most of the situations she found herself in. also i guess henry's emotions get the better of him a lot.

i also didn't really love that mary apologized to maisie before vice versa after she showed her the creature and maisie reacted badly. honestly i feel like she had a lot more to apologize for. yes maybe mary shouldn't have been lying to her the whole time but also she ended up literally being right to keep it from her because she reacted with such disgust!! it was nice that she came around to the creature after watching mary interact with it and it would still be nice for that to be the thing that changed her mind but it made me feel weird. maybe it was supposed to show that mary is willing to be the bigger person for maisie? but it still felt like she was the one less in the wrong so it felt more frustrating than anything.

honestly a really lovely book. full of things i enjoy that i haven't seen enough of. and a couple quotes i liked so much i wanted to take a picture of them (because this book is also not my book it belongs to the library).

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the_lesbrarian's review

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adventurous dark reflective slow-paced

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

4.25

women in stem™ makes terrifying but deeply sympathetic creature

When Mary discovers the notes of her great uncle Victor Frankenstein, she, with the help of her disgraced and childish husband, stitches together her own eldritch dinosaur-esque creature in a desperate plot to prove her worth as a scientist, all while trying to avoid her feelings for her husband’s sister.

The book had some pacing issues— it starts off slow and wraps up very quickly, but the story held my attention well enough that I found I did not mind.

This dark & whimsical novel investigates a unique allegory to grief, motherhood, and queerness.

rep: queer fmc, indian sc

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n0elle's review

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

3.5

I have mixed feelings about this one. For one, I absolutely love classic retellings, especially if they’re sapphic and this one was a very interesting take on the original story of Frankenstein.
Now, while I do know the author tried hard to make it appear historically correct, I found it absolutely exhausting to read hundreds of pages of men dictating the protagonist’s life, telling her what she can and can’t do, how she should behave, what (little) she’s worth.
I’m all for women in STEM, driven by ambition and scientific ideas that lead through breakthroughs. BUT if her ideas and success are always overshadowed by a man or even taken by a man, while she just sits idly by.. that’s infuriating, historically correct but still infuriating. And while the main character did get mad about these things, she always stayed quiet. In the rare moments she didn’t, she was belittled and reprimanded so much, I felt the shame of being a woman bleed through the pages.
Maybe the writing was just too good and too real and it made me feel so many emotions, some of which I could have gone without.

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fromthefoxhole's review

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

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

5.0

6 stars, maybe more. this book is about to be my whole personality. I can't even begin to articulate how much I enjoyed it!! I wanted to start it over again the second it ended. 😭

Frankenstein is one of my all time favorite books, and when I heard "queer feminist retelling" I could not sprint to Libby faster. Having finished Our Hideous Progeny, I would term it more as a sequel - our FMC is Mary, the grand niece of Victor Frankenstein, who only knew of him through the letters our dear Captain Walton left behind. Luckily for us, that voracious curiosity that once consumed Victor very much also has had its claws in Mary since she was young. While she was barred from a formal education as a scientist, she makes up for it with force of will and wit, an insatiable desire for knowledge, and tenacity shaped by a lifetime of exclusion and rejection.

The plot for the first third of the novel is largely to allow us to get to know Mary. We get to see flashbacks of her past alongside instances in the "present" that give weight to her frustration with the scientific society as well as her love for paleontology and natural history. I feel like this slower beginning pace can be frustrating, but it lets our impatience mount with Mary's until finally we arrive at the exciting bit - actually moving forward with attempting to recreate Victor's experiment.

The pace picks up from here for us as the reader as well as for Mary, and things start to spiral out. I won't spoil anything, but relationships take turns, altercations occur, and I ate. it. up. McGill does a phenomenal job getting to the heart of Mary's motives, focusing on her grief, queerness, and living as a woman in a society that regularly demeans women. I found myself getting riled up right alongside Mary, especially in every instance with my new nemesis, Finlay Clarke.

I LOVED the real world references, that the author rooted so much of the story in real and period accurate science. Mary and Henry speak with and are referred to scientists whose work we can still read and those dinosaur sculptures are still up at the Crystal Palace!! The absolute nerd in me couldn't get enough.

Especially for a first novel, I think Our Hideous Progeny hit every target it intended to. I personally cannot wait to see what else McGill writes.

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shawcrit's review

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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nefariousbee's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring slow-paced

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

3.0

Underwhelming. I kept waiting for the main even to come, the monstrous, the hideous to begin, and it never did. The strangest thing is, if the writing allowed it, it would have? What I mean is in theory, what they sis was terrible and monstrous, only the way we are told the story doesn't really do it justice.
I am frankly disappointed. This could have been exciting, dark, passionate... but it fell flat. Somehow it was barely dark. In my opinion this could have been a great book, but it needed to lean into the horror, and do some serious editing. As it is, it's just. Fine.

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lunarmagi42's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.5

Our Hideous Progeny tells the tale of a woman who is, quite frankly, trapped in a society that thinks she is "less than" simply due to the fact that she was born a woman. Worth less than a man, less intelligent than a man, less worthy of scientific acclaim than a man. Less monstrous than a man. Less angry than a man. None of these things are true and she disproves them one by one.

While the story takes some time getting into the whole "Frankenstein" aspect of the book, that time is well spent setting the stage for the fascinating tale to follow. We see how, despite being the mind more or less behind her husband Henry's scientific discoveries, Mary is only ever credited with "And many thanks to M Sutherland for the illustrations." We see how the people who should be her scientific peers look down on her for her gender. We also slowly learn of Mary's discovery of her great uncle, Victor Frankenstein, the Creature he created, and the story of that creation left behind in letters.

Mary's journey to creating her own Creature is fascinating and deeply frustrating, both for Mary herself and for the reader. Over and over she runs into the hurdle of needing a man for something, usually simply due to the fact that women are not allowed in many of the circles she needs to be in to continue her work. Due to the society she lives in, this is not simply a hurdle she can overcome, she must work with Henry and the loathsome Mr. Clarke to bring her discovery to life.

I thought the story was very well written and engaging as well as surprisingly touching at points, especially for a story with as much gore as this one has. Mary's relationship with Maisie is sweet and very natural feeling and her moments of introspection over the loss of her child a year prior are deeply touching. C.E. McGill uses very poignant and eloquent language in a way that feels smooth and nicely poetic to describe a rather gruesome thing: the creation of a Creature, stitched together from the sum of the parts of others.

Our Hideous Progeny is definitely worth a read if you like gothic horror about angry women fighting for their place in society and finding love and solace in an unexpected place. 4.5/5 Stars

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natashaleighton_'s review

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.5

C.E. McGill’s richly detailed and utterly compelling debut was a deliciously gothic and feminist exploration of ambition, obsession, betrayal and love that I couldn’t get enough of!

It’s set in 1851, at the height of the Victorian era’s fascination with all things dinosaur and follows Elizabeth (the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein) who (having spent the better part of her life being looked down on for being a woman interested in science and palaeontology) yearns to find scientific acclaim beyond the footnotes of other people’s research. But without any powerful connections or wealth, neither Mary or her husband stand a chance of ever succeeding.

Armed only with letters containing snippets of her great uncles’ past —of creating life from death (which ultimately led to his own), Mary decides to use what little of his research remains to take the scientific community by storm. And, with her husband Henry, attempt to bring life to a creature never before seen by human eyes.

But on the precipice of success, Mary begins to question the ethics and morality surrounding their creation and the love that she has developed for the creature.

I loved every second of this! It’s such an electrifyingly creative and wholly original take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and I genuinely couldn’t put it down.

The writing is lush and beautifully atmospheric, and as intricately woven as the stitches that adorn the eponymous ‘creature’ which definitely showcases the gothic/horror genre to perfection!

I was in absolute awe of just how immersive the descriptions were and loved that it really delves into the inequalities of the Victorian era and the classist, sexist and racist attitudes which were prevalent and still very much relevant today.

I adored Mary, who’s character takes inspiration from not one but three impressive women of the 19th C: Mary Shelley, Mary Anning (the self-taught palaeontologist who found the first Ichthyosaur fossil) and Mary Somerville (one of the first women admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society), and really enjoyed discovering just how much of their stories connected to our refreshingly bold and sharp-tongued protagonist—especially Mary Anning, who seemed to have to the most in common with our plesiosaur-obsessed MC.

With what we see of Mary’s childhood and isolated upbringing with her grandmother (a woman who seemed to despise Mary simply for existing) I couldn’t help but be endeared to her (and root for her to succeed.)

I was less enamoured of her husband (or any of the male characters aside from Mr. Jamsetjee who was such a sweetheart) though the realism and accuracy to the contemporary attitudes of the day were spot on and really highlighted how remarkably strong Mary (and others like her) had to be to persevere in such a harsh, discriminatory environments.

The pace was quite slow to begin however, I felt it definitely helped to build up that tense, anticipatory feeling that gothic fiction is known for—and by the half way point things really kicked into gear and ‘things’ got super interesting.

If you love dark, gothic-esque historical fiction, queer horror or Silvia Moreno-Garcia then you absolutely must check this out, it’s fantastic!

Also, a massive thank you to Izzie Ghaffari-Parker and Doubleday books for the wonderful proof.

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