nerdyprettythings's Reviews (515)

This book was an unexpected and pleasant surprise. I knew it had been popular several years ago, but not much else. The ambience created by the novel and the circus was my favorite kind, similar to Harry Potter or Neverwhere, where when I had to put the book down I felt like I had been ripped away from its world. My only small beef is spoilery:

The ending felt overly telegraphed. It was as if Romeo and Juliet had begun "a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, one by poison and one by a dagger to the heart."

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and just about couldn't put it down.

I make a practice of not giving star ratings to classics, so for this book, it's just the first half, the new stories, that I'm rating. The gender bending of the narrators and inclusion of new technology was done well in some stories, but I didn't love this. A few of the stories were really good and kept me engaged enough to keep trying them out past the ones I liked less.

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.

I picked this up on a whim from the library, and I’m so glad I did. It’s both a coming of age story and a lesson in grief and how everyone experiences and manages it. I don’t know what I expected, but I read this one without knowing anything about the story beforehand, and it’ll end up being one I spend time thinking about after I return it.

I didn’t realize how actually not that good or heroic the main character is in this book or how quickly (thinly?) the plot is set up. Still love the way it makes you think, but... eh? Not a classic I’d read again.