Name: Monsters
ISBN: 9781783448029

Sharon Dogar

1814: Mary Godwin, the 16-year-old daughter of radical socialist and feminist writers, runs away with a dangerously charming young poet--Percy Bysshe Shelley. From there, the two young lovers travel a Europe in the throes of revolutionary change, through high and low society, tragedy and passion, where they will be drawn into the orbit of the mad and bad Lord Byron. But Mary and Percy are not alone: they bring Jane, Mary's young step-sister. And she knows the biggest secrets of them all . . . Told from Mary and Jane's perspectives, Monsters is a novel about radical ideas, rule-breaking love, dangerous Romantics, and the creation of the greatest Gothic novel of them all: Frankenstein.

Monsters

Eryn Bradshaw

Book received from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Monsters by Sharon Dogar is a retelling of the life shared by Mary Shelley, Sir Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Jane Godwin. Bysshe, a poet, believed in free love. Mary, backed by the feminist ideas by her late mother, found Bysshe's way of thinking fascinating and she and Jane decide to join him in creating a community for those who want to follow the ideas of free love. This retelling recounts their journies across Europe and back, children being born, loss, love, and Mary's writing of Frankenstein.

I really wanted to like this book. Frankenstein is one of my favorite classic novels and a chance to learn about Mary Shelley's life, even if a fictional retelling appealed to me. Unfortunately Monsters: The passion and loss that created Frankenstein fell completely flat in its retelling.

The whole book is written in the present tense. This is something I can overlook, but even flashbacks were written in the present tense which made things so confusing that I often had to turn back and reread what I had just read in order to make sense of what was going on in the novel.

It felt extremely clunky to read and had no real flow. I thought a novel about Mary Shelley and the creation of Frankenstein would be told from Mary's point of view strictly, however, the book is third-person omniscient, leaving no thought by any character untold. It often felt like I had whiplash trying to keep up with the rapid-fire PoV changes.

The portrayal of Mary, Bysshe, and Jane are all extremely unlikeable. I'm not sure if it was on purpose, and though Dogar expressed she had a soft spot for Jane, she was still on par with how dull and pretentious and unlikeable the other portrayals were.

I would not recommend this book for a good retelling of Mary Shelley's life. I haven't done the amount of research that I'm sure Dogar has done, and the timeline of her life was interesting, but the minor details that filled everything in between were lacking in passion and excitement.

Monsters

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