Winterson has quite the way with words and that makes this book a powerful read. I found myself noting many quotations from the text as I went.

The story alternates between a semi-biographical account of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and a modern-day story of Ry and Victor Stein, relating to the development of AI technology. Winterson has cleverly interwoven the themes of the two stories, demonstrating how what Shelley only imagined with Frankenstein are now becoming possible with AI. Through these characters, she delves into the debate surrounding this technology: how should it be use and by whom; what are the ethics behind it?; can AI help people to live forever?

I appreciated the ways in which gender and sexuality were explored as fluid concepts in both stories. However, the character of Ry made me uncomfortable at times. Ry is transgender and while he is a main character of the modern storyline, I often felt that his presence was merely there as a plot device, as a character through which we could explore another definition of what it means to be human. I imagine that this latter point was Winterson's aim with including him, but it often comes off as a stereotype and a relatively unsympathetic one.

Winterson's writing is meandering and stream-of-consciousness, which will certainly not work for some readers. But I found that it helped her to explore certain points about the creation of life. And ultimately this book is an experiment, much like Frankenstein's monster: she combines seemingly disparate parts of a story––the 19th century literary scene and the 21st scientific one––together into an exploration of human life and how it can be understood.

TW: transphobia; homophobia; sexual assault