Evocative and tinged with sadness. I liked the modern take to highlight the universality of the themes in the original. Now I want to read more from Winterson.

This was just a case of this being the completely wrong book for me. I thought the premise sounded interesting but the subject matter was a little too explicit for me. I also had a hard time with the writing style and the fact that there were no quote marks. Everything felt so choppy to me. I’m disappointed that this one wasn’t a hit, but I’m definitely not the right fit for this book.

This book is an original take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It was interesting but also hard to get through. There was a lot going on and with a copy that wasn't well formatted, it just made it impossible to follow the story. I will probably give this one another shot on paper.

This book is sort of epic. It's a retelling of Frankenstein. I bet you didn't figure that out from the title, right? Obvious Girl strikes again!

Anyway, there is a lot going on with this. Ry Shelley is non-binary, but presents as a male. Victor Stein is working to prolong life after death and despite not previously having engaged in non-hetero sexual relationships, finds himself attracted to Ry.

The whole book is about a disconnect between the mind and the body. What happens to you after you die and what exactly is the body other than a meat suit? I am way oversimplifying. Let's just say that it makes you think about stuff and that is always a good thing imo.

There is this one scene that takes place in a bar that absolutely broke my heart. You'll have to read it yourself to understand.

I am torn as to how to talk about this book. On the one hand, I enjoyed the historical fiction aspect of seeing Mary Shelley create the science fiction genre. I also intrigued by the premise of a trans doctor helping a (dare I say mad) scientist procure parts for experiments in the midst of a sex expo. However, the way other characters were opening transphobic toward Ry, including an assault that was too briefly discussed, and the way Ry spoke about himself makes me wonder if there were any trans sensitivity readers employed during the editing process. The writing was beautiful but the story was questionable.

I am in charge of the senior library and work with a group of Reading Ambassadors from 16-18 to ensure that our boarding school library is modernised and meets the need of both our senior students and staff. It has been great to have the chance to talk about these books with our seniors and discuss what they want and need on their shelves. I was drawn to his book because I thought it would be something different from the usual school library fare and draw the students in with a tempting storyline and lots to discuss.
This book was a really enjoyable read with strong characters and a real sense of time and place. I enjoyed the ways that it maintained a cracking pace that kept me turning its pages and ensured that I had much to discuss with them after finishing. It was not only a lively and enjoyable novel but had lots of contemporary themes for our book group to pick up and spend hours discussing too.
I think it's important to choose books that interest as well as challenge our students and I can see this book being very popular with students and staff alike; this will be an excellent purchase as it has everything that we look for in a great read - a tempting premise, fantastic characters and a plot that keeps you gripped until you close its final page.

In 1816, a group of young radicals from England gather overseas in a villa. They include Lord Byron, the poet Shelley, a doctor, Shelley's wife, Mary, and Mary's stepsister who is Byron's lover. There is not much to do as it rains incessantly. Bored, Byron challenges everyone to write a new work, including the nineteen year old Mary. She writes the story of Frankenstein, which she uses to explore her feelings about how each individual has their own worth and every person should be free to experiment and live to their fullest potential.

In modern age Britain, Ry Shelley, a descendant of Mary, is a doctor and a transgender who is making the transition from life as a woman to that of a man. He meets a brilliant scientist, Victor Stein, who is interested in how life can be defined, the field of artificial intelligence and the quest for immortality. Ry is willing to help at first, bringing Victor discarded limbs for his experiments but she hesitates when he reveals the full range of his experiments and what he is willing to do to push the barriers of what it means to be human.

This novel was a longlist nominee for the Booker Prize last year. It is an interesting mix of the two time periods and what it means to be human in each era. In the early 1800's, it is the ability for women to be treated as full citizens of the countries they inhabit. In modern times, it is the ability of each person to define basic facts about themselves such as gender and appearance, to do the work they desire and to push the frontiers of knowledge. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

I appreciated what the author was trying to do but it wasn’t executed well. I dragged through the writing even though I was so excited about the premise initially.

The concept is great- 2 timelines: Mary Shelley writing her novel and Dr. Ry Shelley a trans person who is figuring out their identity. The mere were some parallels but absolutely no action in the story, just a lot of back and forth conversations on post-humanism, religion, technology, sexbots, creation, and men versus women. Nothing too new. Very close to DNF-ing.

4.5★
“Yeah, you can be old, you can be ugly, you can be fat, smelly, you can have an STD, you can be broke. Whether you can’t get it up, or you can’t get it down, there’s an XX-BOT for you. Public service. I tell you, it is. Do you think I might get an MBE? Mum would love that.”

Well, that was certainly different! Even for Winterson, whom I always enjoy, this was an inventive, imaginative blend of past, present, and future. It is also a cautionary tale of “be careful what you wish for”.

The speaker of the above is Ron Lord, promoter of sexbots that cater for all. Winterson is playful with names, and there does come a time when the name “Lord” does get a turn.

Victor is another. Victor Stein is a current-day doctor investigating self-designing brains and cryonics, while Victor Frankenstein is the doctor in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous novel about his creation of a monster (whom we usually refer to as Frankenstein now). Mary’s name crops up as Ry, who is gender-fluid.

“When I look in the mirror I see someone I recognise, or rather, I see at least two people I recognise. . . . I am what I am, but what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live with doubleness.”

The three stories alternate, but they do overlap in unusual ways. It begins with Mary, who was married young to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein when she was only 19 years old. She was the daughter of famous feminist, author, philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft who died shortly after the birth.

Mary ran with a cool crowd – the poets. Doesn’t this sound like a current crop of celebrities holidaying and partying together? Keeping Up With The Poets?

“In the summer of 1816 the poets Shelley and Byron, Byron’s physician, Polidori, Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, by then Byron’s mistress, rented two properties on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Byron enjoyed the grand Villa Diodati, while the Shelleys took a smaller, more charming house, a little lower down the slope. Such was the notoriety of the households that an hotel on the farther shore of the lake set up a telescope for their guests to watch the antics of the supposed Satanists and Sexualists who held their women in common.”

Mary was bright (she edited her husband’s work) and outspoken, but the boys often put her in her place, especially Lord Byron, who was about ten years older.

“Byron is of the opinion that woman is from man born – his rib, his clay – and I find this singular in a man as intelligent as he. I said, It is strange, is it not, that you approve of the creation story we read in the Bible when you do not believe in God? He smiles and shrugs, explaining – It is a metaphor for the distinctions between men and women. He turns away, assuming I have understood and that is the end of the matter, but I continue, calling him back as he limps away like a Greek god. May we not consult Doctor Polidori here, who, as a physician, must know that since the creation story no living man has yet given birth to anything living? It is you, sir, who are made from us, sir.

The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me, up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.”

Oh, don’t you want to slap the man? ”. . . assuming I have understood and that is the end of the matter.”

Mary’s story covers several years of her life, how she is inspired to write and then frightened of her creation. Nightmares, recriminations. The monster’s story is told as if it is real – a kind of AI gone awry.

“The monster I have made is shunned and feared by humankind. His difference is his downfall. He claims no natural home. He is not human, yet the sum of all he has learned is from humankind.”

Back to the future (today), and the sexbot promoter and the brain-developer, Victor Stein. His claim to fame is his theory that the future is not biology, it is AI. Artificial Intelligence.

“He said, I called this lecture The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World because artificial intelligence is not sentimental – it is biased towards best possible outcomes. The human race is not a best possible outcome.”

There are a couple of love stories woven through this with tenderness, passion, sex, and betrayal. The parts that appealed to me were Mary with her poets and Ry with Victor (brains) and Ron Lord (sexbots). I didn’t care much for the monster and poor Victor Frankenstein, but of course, that’s the story that holds the rest together.

There’s history – the Luddites smash looms because they don’t want “progress”, which means being replaced by machines. And we meet Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who is credited with writing the first algorithm for a ‘mathematical machine’ (first computer). She was featured as recently as 2020 in Spyfall 2 and an episode of Dr. Who. There is an Ada Lovelace medal and an annual Ada Lovelace day. But I digress.

With Winterson, there’s also humour, and she makes the most of Ron Lord and his sexbots with something for everybody. The descriptions of how to transport them (folding, etc) are hilarious, as are many of the supporting characters in this remarkable book.

“And over to Vintage. I love the two-piece suit and pillbox hat. I got this idea from the retro-porn sites. She’s late to the game but she brings plenty to the party.”

I'm sorry I've not shown examples of Winterson's chameleon-like ability to change voice, and style, and time, and character. Every person is their own self, if I can put it like that, and the descriptions of time and place suit each of them.

There are no quotation marks, and the e-book version in my Kindle messed up the formatting, so that I had to refer to the NetGalley PDF from time to time to figure out which time period I was in and who was speaking. I was so frustrated, I nearly gave up, but I trusted that Winterson would get me home safely (and she did). I've now seen the real e-book, and it's fine.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted. I can see why it made the 2019 Booker Prize longlist.

RATING:3 STARS
2019; Grove Atlantic/Grove Press

Frankissstein was my first novel by Jeanette Winterson, who has been on my tbr list for years. I loved her writing, but the book didn't work for me. I choose it for it's retelling of Frankenstein, a novel I love. I did appreciate the parallels, but I didn't connect with the story. I am not a big science fiction reader SO this could totally be over my head. I am really looking forward to my next Jeanette Winterson novel.

***I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.***

I've been a Jeanette Winterson fan since reading Written on the Body for the first time back in the mid-'90s. Although I've never encountered another story from her that I've loved quite as much as that one, I've still found myself enjoying every book she's written since (and a few from before). Frankissstein is no exception. It's good to see that Winterson continues to push boundaries by including characters from all walks of life.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a free ARC. This review contains my honest, unbiased opinion.

The author has written a creepy story literate fiction at its best a book I couldn’t put down.Will be recommending to my friends who enjoy literary fiction,#netgalley#groveatlantic

Thank you to the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
Unfortunately, I have tried reading this book on 2 separate occasions and during that 2nd attempt, I have only managed to make it halfway through so I’d rather stop here and state that this book just wasn't for me.

Lots of interesting things going on, ideas discussed but I found it confusing at times and never very engaged. I also ended up listening to the book in audio and was disappointed with the format.

There's a reason this novel and Winterson are always earning nominations for great book prizes! Winterson is a master of her craft and just keeps getting better with each year and novel she releases.

I really enjoyed this - it was clever and the writing was perfectly rendered to capture the multiple perspectives and timelines. There were moments of hilarity (oh, those sex-bots!) but also some really interesting and deeper discussions around gender and constructed binaries and AI, and thematically tying these all together across multiple timelines was masterfully done! Will definitely be reading more Winterson following this.

A thoroughly modern rendering of the Frankenstein story that self-consciously pays tribute to the creation of both the monster and the myth. I was hesitant to pick this up considering I often recoil at retellings, but this is anything but derivative.

This was a story that I didn't quite know what to make of it. I have read Jeanette Winterson before and quite liked her unusual style.

This story, however, about Frankenstein reanimated, had too much going on for me and I felt confused and bored at times. There are two stories going on in this novel: one takes place during the early 1800's between Mary Shelley and her husband (and her connection to Lord Byron), and the other in the present day with a scientist/professor,Victor and his love story with a trans-gendered person named Ry (along with an odd side story about Ron, a creator of sexbot dolls). I really didn't know what to make of Mary's story until I was gripped by her children dying. Ry and Victor's story was interesting, but Ron's side story was a bit tasteless and unnecessary at times.

Overall, I enjoyed parts of this story and other parts I could have done without. The ending, although satisfying, did not warrant a higher rating. I recommend this novel to fans of hers or any unusual writing style, but with a word of caution that if you prefer a more linear story, you may be disappointed with this one.

Thank you Grove Atlantic/NetGalley for my copy and honest review.

This is a masterful interplay between Mary Shelley’s experience in 1818, when she was writing “Frankenstein”, and that of a counterpart Mary 100 years later, who is a transsexual called Ry working as a tech journalist. The result is a wonderful mashup of the early dream over artificial life, with her “monster” among the first conceptions of a non-human intelligence, and the current status of human reach toward mastery of life and progress toward transhuman existence along multiple lines, including artificial intelligence, cybernetics, androids, cryogenics, and, last but not least gender selection. Though stuffed with ideas and their linkages, the dual tales that Winterson spins out do pretty well, considering the challenges, of letting her lively ensemble of characters “show” more than “tell” the of the various technology solutions they are involved with. As icing on the cake, Winterson serves up along the way a lot of satirical humor over the extreme positions taken by the proponents of the different approaches to expand human limitations, particularly in in the area sexbots.

Clearly there is plenty here to satisfy sci fans, but the sensitive and realistic portrayal of Mary Shelley and the social context feeding into her ideas and speculative imagination should appeal to those who love historical fiction. She starts her famous tale amid the Gothic atmospherics of her stay with Percy on a Swiss lake with Byron, his mistress, and an Italian doctor as neighbors (and other watching neighbors titillated by spying on the group, who are presumed “Satanists and Sexualists who held their women in common”. A mutual challenge for writing projects relating to the supernatural, combined with the ongoing revolt of Luddites back home against machine automation of looms in the cloth making factories, leads Mary to start her speculative story as precautionary tale on the cost of scientific overreaching. The darkness of having lost her mother, feminist pioneer Mary Wollenscroft, at her birth and the death of three of her own children with Shelley to stillbirth or disease contributes to her creative efforts:

"I will call my hero (is he a hero?) Victor—for he seeks a victory of life over death.
He will compose a man, larger than life, and make him live. I will use electricity. Storm, Spark, Lightning . I will rod him with fire, like Prometheus. He will steal life from the gods. At what cost?
…The creature will be more than human. But he will not be human.
…Yet he suffers. Suffering I do believe is something of the marker of the soul. Machines do not suffer."

Like her character Victor Frankenstein, Mary has doubts over whether a creature constructed of body parts would have a soul, a source of horror to both of them. A turning point for the creature becoming a monster comes when the scientist empathizes with its loneliness and lack of love and considers creating a female companion, but changes his mind when imagining their spawning a whole species. It fascinated me how many feel comparable horrors over AIs developing a conscious identity and possibly seeing humans as enemies (think Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the AI “Singularity” leap in “The Terminator”).

Winterson has already demonstrated herself to be a literary wizard at navigating of the LGBT experience with her “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and “Sexing the Cherry” (and “Written on the Body”, a TBR). Previously, her “Gut Symmetries” explored the impact of three physicists exploring a three-way sexual love triangle on their personalizing their interpretation of quantum physics. Here she is brilliant for making sexuality and love an arena for considering the significance and impact of new technologies (she does subtitle the book “A Love Story”). The love of Mary for husband Shelley encompasses both body and soul, so all his poetical talk of his sense of identity as an immortal soul being trapped in a decaying body doesn’t ring true:

How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?
Is it my body you love?
And how can I say to him that I sit watching him while he sleeps, while his mind is quiet and his lips silent, and that I kiss him for the body I love?
I cannot divide you, I say."

Ry shows a comparable sense of integrated love of the body and mind of the computer genius Victor Stein (the analogous character to Dr. Frankenstein and at the same time a counterpart to Shelley). It makes her doubt his dream of achieving immortality of identity by computer brain emulation. As with Mary, for Ry the human mind and personality is embodied in the context of the sensual physical world as well as flesh. Victor here tries to assail her view but fails:

"Really, Ry, when you consider a human as a collection of limbs and organs, then what is human? As long as your head is on, pretty much everything else can go, can’t it? And yet you dislike the idea of intelligence not bound to a body. That is irrational of you.
We are our bodies, I said."

Though Ry is not convinced, his choice of sticking with an intermediate transsexual status that fits with his binary gender identity already makes him sympathetic to the transhumanist dream of life free of meat bodies:
"…we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body.
(Victor): Weren’t we just saying that in the future we will be able to choose our bodies? And to change them? Think of yourself as future-early."

This impressive elision Winterson makes of transsexual and transhuman is matched by her parallel analogies of Ry being the counterpart of Frankenstein’s creature. Though the creature “was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy”, all attempts at friendly human contact result in violent attacks at its horrific appearance. Similarly, Ry becomes the subject to a brutal sexual assault from a man who reacts with: “NO TITS. NO DICK. FUCKIN’ FREAK!”

Ry gets the upper hand with me in her doubts about the extreme transhumanist agenda despite my longstanding affinity for sci fi tales of AIs, androids, cyborgs, and downloading minds into computers. With me my doubt comes from knowledge of the complexity of the brain and deep ignorance of how any complex behavior, much less a conscious self, can emerge from its activity based on a 20-year career in neuroscience. I appreciate too her pragmatic cynicism about the transhumanist goals:
"Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans, forever humans, with all the shit that comes with us? Morally and spiritually, we are barely crawling out of the sea onto dry land. We’re not ready for the future you want."

But Victor is in a hurry. He wants to live to see a future of safety of the human species from extinction, and reaches for the following eloquence:
"Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antoinette with no cake.
We all have to grow up. Even an entire species has to grow up.

…The story told by every religion in some form or another; the earth is fallen, reality is an illusion, our souls will live forever. Our bodies are a front—or perhaps more accurately, an affront—to the beauty of our nature as beings of light.
As far as I am concerned, what is happening now, at last, with I, is something like a homecoming. What we dreamed is in fact the reality. We are not bound to our bodies. We can live forever."

Humor is a saving salsa for Winterson’s relatively serious meal of competing ideas. For example, the lofty transhumanist goal is deflated by an enthusiast bearing a T-shirt that reads” “Give Up Meat.” The most prominent server of laughs is Ron Lord, the contemporary analog of the Shelley’s friend, Lord Byron, who is cast as an outrageous huckster and innovator of sexbots. Our disgust as he rails on and on about different female models for different markets, vibrating orifices, replaceable parts for wear and customization, etc, soon goes over the top when he speaks of a version that can be folded up into a suitcase or tossed into the trunk of a car. And then there is the hilarious insanity of this model:
"There’s even a 70s feminist version with no bra, messy hair and a dildo for anal play. Yeah! Clever! She gets to fuck you! No, I haven’t tried it. I do try them all, but I didn’t fancy that one. In the office we called her the Germaine. She’s the only one with a name. …Who rents her? Some masochists, and a few university professors."

His crass marketing makes such bizarre sense, it probably approximates current reality:
No diseases, no revenge porn, no getting robbed of your Rolex at 2 a.m."

A travel companion model for car rental companies has this promotion:
"No nagging about stopping for lunch or needing the toilet. No sulking about the Holiday Inn you’ve booked. She’s next to you, long hair, long legs, you choose the music, beautiful woman in the passenger seat."

When asked about male versions for women, he notes:
"I’ve got some ideas from when I used to repair pop-up toasters."

As one more choice bit to whet your interest in the fun factor in this novel, Ron here questions Ry’s form of gender bending:
"Why would you want to be a man if you don’t want a dick?
A man is not a dick on legs, is he?
More or less, says Ron.."

Victor denies the relevance of sexbots or other androids in his vision for human transformation. But money talks, and he takes him on as an investor. Ron’s interest in engaging speech and autonomous mobility to enhance his marketing of sexbots sounds plausible as a driving factor for AI and tech advance. This wouldn’t be that different from the impact of another realm of entertainment, computer gaming, has had on virtual reality and avatar realism.

The ending for Mary’s story has a fascinating linkage of her life with that of her characters as well as an interlude with Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, who first imagined a software program to run Babbage mechanical computer prototype. A minor caveat is that the ending of the contemporary story was murky and confusing after raising the reader to a crescendo of drama and mystery.

All in all, this book was a great ride for me. I read it over a month ago, and now revisiting the narrative I had to up its rating given how well-crafted its construction felt was and how much pleasure its cavalcade of surprising linkages rendered.

This book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.