Review by Booklist Review
Mary Shelley was 19 when she wrote Frankenstein. Drawing upon letters, diaries, and other "slivers of a life," Dutch novelist Eekhout delivers an engrossing fictional account of two pivotal sojourns that stirred the monster lurking within Mary's imagination. At 14, in Scotland, Mary encounters a place steeped in folklore and dark tales that frees her to fantasize; she also forms a fleeting friendship that awakens adolescent yearning. In Switzerland, age 18, Mary struggles with tumultuous emotions: fierce love for her husband, Percy Shelley, and their infant son; haunting grief for a short-lived daughter, and confused jealousy of Percy's attachment to her stepsister and their friend Lord Byron. When Byron proposes they each write a ghost story, the monster Mary first glimpsed in Scotland emerges. Crossing the Channel back to England, Mary is determined to finish her story, "her sweet, true imagination . . . her growling, snarling, unyielding beast." Mary is a nuanced, beautifully atmospheric portrayal of a young woman's intense inner life, foreshadowing Frankenstein's themes of grief, loneliness, and the desire for love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Eekhout in her English-language debut mines Mary Shelley's biography for an atmospheric story of the strange weather and personal turbulence that inspired the author to write Frankenstein. While visiting Switzerland in 1816, Mary grieves her deceased child and frets over her young son, simmers with jealousy over her husband Percy's other lovers, and routinely becomes irritated with her stepsister, Claire. She also takes in the otherworldly weather, the skies darkened by a volcano eruption in the Dutch East Indies. Mary first demurs when challenged by Lord Byron and his friend John Polidori to write a ghost story, but she reconsiders after remembering her intense childhood friendship with Isabella Baxter. In flashbacks, Eekhout shows how as teens in 1812 Dundee, Scotland, Mary and Isabella convince each other that monsters and witches are real. The girls, who develop a sexual relationship, are prone to mysterious blackouts, and Eekhout hints they're being drugged by Isabella's brother-in-law, David Booth. The plot seamlessly blends Mary's development as a writer with her emotional turmoil, as Mary realizes what she must put to paper: "ugly, colorless, and vague because it thought it was unfit to be seen." Eekhout pulls off a convincing gothic sensibility in this well-crafted portrait of Shelley's interior life. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A moody and evocative reveal of the backstory (behind the backstory) of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein. Shelley's writing of the now-classic gothic novel--featuring a scientist whose experiments unwittingly create a monstrous life form--occurred, remarkably, while she was still a teenager. Eekhout explores the 18-year-old author's actions during the summer of 1816, when she and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her poet husband, traveled to Switzerland with a coterie of fellow authors and family members. Spurred to write a ghost story by an impromptu contest among members of the group (which also included Lord Byron) to enliven the dreary and stormy summer, Shelley began the work that is often considered the first English-language science-fiction novel. Interwoven with the story of the summer of 1816 are Shelley's imagined recollections of time spent in 1812 with family acquaintances in Dundee, Scotland, during a sojourn to restore her ailing health. There, the imaginative and sensitive girl forms an intimate friendship with Isabella Baxter, another restive and motherless teen, and the two embark on a monthslong intense and mercurial relationship. Encouraged by the Baxter family's love of storytelling, and with access to more sources of creepy fables, folklore, and myth than she enjoyed at home in London, Shelley entertains (with the companionship and encouragement of Isabella) more and more of her fervid imaginings. The girls' fever dream of a summer together is marked by sexual longing and exploration as well as Mary's growing awareness of the roles of reality and unreality in narrative. Translated from the Dutch by Watkinson, this novel includes a translator's note with a nod to the role of imagination in filling the gaps left by history books. Creative confirmation of Shelley's position as the mother of all goth girls. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
