venneh 's review for:

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

2.0

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So, this is the last book I finished in 2021, and I can honestly say that I’m disappointed that I ended it on this transphobic piece of shit. I wish I had chosen to not finish it rather than give it the benefit of the doubt, and it’s honestly something that I don’t say often about books. I gave it a shot through the eye rolling lack of quotation marks (it doesn’t make it literary, it just makes it a pain in the ass). I gave it a chance through the excruciating chapters about sex bots and the speculation about “what it meant for women”. I gave it a chance through the painfully one note religious black woman. I even gave it a shot through the bullshit “is it your story coming to life or is this rando just crazy or???” plot line that she threw in halfway through the Mary Shelley parts of the book. But after a certain point a lot of the things people were saying in the modern part of the book started to sound like the bs that a certain type of British TERF throws around, and I finally did a Google search for the author’s name and gender critical, and guess what the fuck I found, her putting out some hand wringing bullshit about “oh what if we’re giving kids hormones too soon”. That put the rampant transphobia and gratuitous sexual assault of a trans person that got thrown at the reader out of nowhere in the rest of the book into context. I’m genuinely angry that I got pitched what seemed like an interesting take on a trans character in the context of the Frankenstein idea, and nah, it’s just some transphobic Frankenstein’s monster bullshit dressed up in the pretension of “being literary”. Winterson even pulls the “I hope I didn’t cause offense, it’s just a story” horseshit in the author’s notes at the end and that’s where I ended up throwing the book. This is going into a little free library with a sticky note that warns for transphobic bs because I would rather whoever comes on this next come into it with the warning of what they’re getting themselves into.