Hey everyone! It turns out one of my new friends I met this year absolutely loves Frankenstein and Mary Shelly. So when I received an ARC of Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein from Macmillan in exchange for an honest review, I asked her if she was interested in reading and reviewing it for the blog (whether it be positive or negative) and she said yes!
Synopsis and Cover Photo (Goodreads):
A young adult biography of Frankenstein’s profound young author, Mary Shelley, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of its publication, told through free verse and 300+ full-bleed illustrations.
Mary Shelley first began penning Frankenstein as part of a dare to write a ghost story, but the seeds of that story were planted long before that night. Mary, just nineteen years old at the time, had been living on her own for three years and had already lost a baby days after birth. She was deeply in love with famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a mad man who both enthralled and terrified her, and her relationship with him was rife with scandal and ridicule. But rather than let it crush her, Mary fueled her grief, pain, and passion into a book that the world has still not forgotten 200 years later.
Dark, intense, and beautiful, this free-verse novel with over 300 pages of gorgeous black-and-white watercolor illustrations is a unique and unforgettable depiction of one of the greatest authors of all time.
So here are Arika’s thoughts on Lita Judge’s Mary’s Monsters:
“I want to start by saying that I love Frankenstein. The concept, the writing, and the fact that it was written by a woman in a time when a novel being written by a woman meant that it wouldn’t even sell. I love Frankenstein, which means I love Mary Shelley. I was hoping to love this book, too, a book about Mary Shelley, but I didn’t. I found myself picking it up and putting it down, reading a page here and there, or quite a bit all at once and then none at all for a week. It was a fairly quick read once I committed to it, and there was nothing wrong with it, but there wasn’t anything outstanding, either. Really, the part I liked the most about this novel was the illustrations; they managed to breathe a little life into an otherwise fairly lifeless story.
The story is written in short snippets of verse, depicting different times in Mary Shelley’s life from her point of view. I like the concept, but every time I started to feel like I was understanding Mary, started to feel like she was actually a character in this book that I could relate to, the section would end and I was on to another. There was nothing for me to really grab on and connect to. I felt like I was reading a romanticized version of her Wikipedia page. Being a Frankenstein fan, I already knew the basics of Mary Shelley coming into reading this, and I didn’t learn anything new about her from this novel, just a reiteration of the basics.
Really, there is nothing wrong with this book, there’s just nothing about it that I like, and that’s what I think it comes down to. If you’re looking for something to read, I would just suggest reading Frankenstein instead.”
Although Arika may not have loved the book, if you’re interested in Mary’s Monster, definitely check it out when the book releases on January 30, 2018! The illustrations are quite something . . . although they do kind of creep me out, but maybe that’s a good thing.
