Bearing in mind that I wasn’t really a fan of the Mary Shelley original, I liked Kiersten White’s version less than I’d hoped. The premise is terrific — make the story about a teenage girl undervalued by those around her — but I think she took it too far in making Victor an actual sociopath obsessed with Elizabeth. I like nuance and moral gray areas, and White seems to have eschewed them in favor of a clear hero/villain/victim dichotomy and fairly standard plot/character development. The one scene I did enjoy was the nod to canon: Victor’s journals, in which

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he rewrites the story to presumably the version he tells Walton, with “so many descriptions of mountains”; however, given the ending, White’s version can’t really coexist with Shelley’s novel

.

The subtleties of the original story are lost (which is the real monster, Frankenstein or his creation? Well, White has a very clear answer for that; she’s also taken the mystery out of Victor’s creation process, whereas Mary Shelley hardly even hints at the details “to prevent others from trying to recreate it”), and while the ending looked like a great intersection of retelling and original, the actual climax was far too rushed and even undermined the buildup. (Look, I don’t really like when

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dead characters come back to life, especially in the very next chapter

, and besides, I never really connected with Elizabeth.)