It’s half modern retelling/half from the perspective of Mary Shelley as she’s writing and reflecting on Frankenstein. My biggest gripe is with the modern story. Feminist critiques of bots and AI are brought up and dismissed by the modern characters as whining, and though most of the modern characters have names from Frankenstein or from Shelley’s life, the narrator of the modern section, Ry Shelley, mentions Frankenstein as if the book in the form we know it exists in his universe. Yet he, Ry Shelley, is working with, procuring body parts for, and in love with Victor Stein, the professor and arguably mad scientist. I enjoyed that this book made me think about life and death and where consciousness and AI fit in, but I didn’t love the actual storytelling.