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rosemaryandrue 's review for:
Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein
by Anne Eekhout
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The year is 1812, and fourteen-year-old Mary Goodwin is living in pastoral Dundee, where she may find love but may find danger as well. The year is 1816, and eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley is living in rainy Geneva, where she may conceive of something that is strange and fearful and all hers, if she will allow herself to do it.
I have still not read Frankenstein. (I keep meaning to! There's just so many books to read!) But I am familiar with its plot, and the famous story of how it first came to be written. I never did consider how Mary Shelley came to write such a unique book, what inspiration might have been brewing long with her before it bubbled out in 1816. In this book, we get a take on it.
Eekhout's writing has a slippery, dreamy quality to it - it took me a little while to gain my bearings, and to figure out exactly what was going on in this morass of imagination and reality. But once I got to grips with what was happening, I found myself immersed in the strange, dark world in which Mary lived in 1812, her relationship with Isabella, and the looming danger of Mr. Booth, and did not care what was really happening and what was not, which is probably the point.
You'll notice I'm not mentioning the second timeline set in 1816, and that's with good reason - I found myself quite uninterested in it. Maybe because I'm familiar with how Frankenstein came about already, but I think also because the characters were not so well-sketched out there, the time not sufficiently bridged, so that I felt I was almost reading about a different Mary too, one who does not draw the through-line to the past until almost the very end.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.