Melinda Taub is masterful at writing in the tone of whatever classic literature character she chooses while still putting her own twist on the story. From the first page, it is so clear that you are reading from the perspective of Mary Bennet. She is often an unreliable narrator and not the most lovable character. But the story was so unique and a fun mix of regency Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Another Pride and Prejudice retelling for the semiquincentennial (250th) of Jane Austen's birth! Mary Bennet, the overlooked middle sister of P&P, gets to star in this science fiction Frankenstein-influenced Regency tale with a side of Sapphic romance. I was never quite sure what was going to happen next at any point in this book. I was very engaged for the first half, but the momentum seemed to wobble in the last half, especially with few year time skip in the last third. The epistolary/diary narrative style just wasn't as well serving in the last half.

Mary was a good main character and I did root for her happiness and success. Mary doesn't get much focus in the source material beyond annoying and baffling her family, but Taub does an excellent job explaining away her irritating aspects. The relationship between Mary and her love interest is definitely not the focus of this book, but I think helped humanize her, too. LGBT relationships are always nail biters in historical fiction, and I'm content with how this story concluded.

If you're looking for an offbeat Regency retelling with Gothic vibes, I think this will be of interest to you! I am interested in reading Taub's Lydia retelling now, too.

Thank you, Grand Central Publishing, for eye arc!

Thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the eARC!
I loved this book so much! Taub did a fantastic job of creating a riveting story with lots of twists and turns. I loved being in Mary Bennet's head, and I loved the way Taub used a combination of the epistolary format with the regular story-telling format. There were several places along the way where I definitely didn't see the twists coming. I loved Georgiana in this book, and I think Taub explored the Frankenstein elements in a really interesting way.
I think Pike was a really well done character, too. The roller coaster of how the town treated him was so interesting. Taub is a great storyteller, and I'll definitely be checking her other books out!

I loved this book so much. Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice are the greatest. I am pleased how Melinda Taub made Mary’s life. Mary was a great main character. This is my first book by Melinda Taub, but it won’t be my last!

i LOVE Pride and Prejudice. I LOVE Frankenstein. So it should be no shock to learn I love this mashup even better. Mary Bennet is one of the best characters I've read in a while, and I love how this story went. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

Mary Bennet has always been different from her sisters. Considered the ugly sister by society and the odd one by just about everyone, she’s never fit in. As a scientist, what other people think mostly doesn’t matter as long as she is able to find ways to learn about and practice it. Everything changes when Mary finds a friend in Septimus Pike after striking a business deal with him. When her hard work becomes extremely fruitful, Mary discovers that Pike isn’t what she believed him to be, and he discovers that she can raise the dead.

This is among the most interesting Pride and Prejudice retellings I’ve read because it’s also a Frankenstein retelling! Told through a series of letters, and later diary entries, we follow the ultimate middle child: Mary Bennet. The story truly brings the forgotten sister to the forefront and we get to watch her fight her way to get around what society will allow a woman to do. During her journey, we also see her figure out how to bring the recently deceased back to life and how that quickly goes south.

You have no idea how excited I was to read this book! It was almost everything I’d hope it would be. I was completely absorbed in the story until the very end, which is when it started to fizzle out. My only real complaint is that Mary’s early letters sound more like they came from her memoir, and the rest of her letters were really just diary entries before they actually became her diary entries later on. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story.

An incredibly fun follow up to The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch!

I liked the first installment in this series and thought it was one of the rare Pride & Prejudice retellings that actually holds up, but didn't love it mainly due to its pacing issues. However, The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet captured my attention and my heart.

The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet deviates from the source material far more than the first installment does, creating a genre mash-up weaving in elements of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What results is a more layered, faster-paced, darker, more gothic and more queer story that follows scientist Mary Bennet and her love Georgiana Darcy. I adored this book and could not recommend it more highly!

Thank you to NetGalley, Grand Central Publishing, and Melinda Taub for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are my own!

What do you get when you cross Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice and make it sapphic? a MASTERPIECE.
This is my first and not my last Melinda Taub book but I'm all in!!!

A terrifically entertaining mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, with a lovely balance of mad scientist hijinks and the social conundrums of being a woman in Jane Austen's world. Mary Bennet is a surprisingly great main character, and the plot just flows. Highly recommended.

I’m a huge fan of Pride & Prejudice and I absolutely love retelling sand sequels of the story. I find them really fun, I like seeing writers twist the story around in a new way. This is basically P&P with Frankenstein thrown it and then make it gay. It was fantastic, I loved this characterization of Mary so much. I had a blast with this and couldn’t put it down, it blends a new story with everything i love about P&P. I couldn’t put it down. I plan on reading Taub’s Lydia book ASAP.

I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennett by Melinda Taub is a fun and surprising story that mixes romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, and LGBT themes. It reimagines Mary Bennet from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with a twist of the story of Frankenstein. Mary has a amazingly sharp mind and the propensity to break away from the rules of her time. The book blends tense moments with humor, adds a touch of horror, and features a strong, science-driven female lead. I especially enjoyed how the story challenged expectations while still feeling grounded in its historical setting. The mix of genres worked well and kept the plot feeling fresh and unpredictable. Overall, it was an enjoyable and creative read.

Thank you NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the advanced reader copy. This is my honest review.

"An utterly fantastical and undeniably queer melding of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein that recasts Mary Bennet as an insatiable scientist, one who creates a monster in an attempt to save herself from spinsterdom. Awkward, plain, and overlooked, Mary Bennet has long been out of favor not only with her own family but with generations of readers of Pride and Prejudice. But what was this peculiar girl really doing while her sisters were falling in love?

As, one by one, Mary's sisters get married, she hatches a plan. If the world won't give this fierce, lonely girl a place, she'll carve one out herself. In a desperate bid to avoid becoming a burden on her family or, worse, married to a controlling man, Mary does what any bright, intrepid girl would do. She takes to the attic and teaches herself to reanimate the dead. If finding acceptance requires a husband, she'll get one...even if she has to make him herself.

However, Mary's genius and determination aren't enough to control the malevolent force that she unwittingly unleashes. Soon, her attempts to rein in the destruction wreaked by her creations leads her to forge a perhaps unlikely friendship with another brilliant young woman unlike any she's ever known. As that friendship blossoms into something passionate and all-consuming, Mary begins to realize that she may have to choose between the acceptance she's always fought for and true happiness."

Oh my, a monstrous new take on Regency Magic!

I devoured this!! What a wholly unique take on Frankenstein mixed with the much loved Pride & Prejudice characters. I was utterly gripped and could not put this down. This is a novel filled with wit, humor, romance, and feminine rage. Mary is a captivating and brilliant MC and it was truly a ride experiencing the events through her account. I think this author really knocked it out of the park with the masterful weaving of horror and science. I will say towards the end the plot started to get a bit wobbly with certain reveals confusing me a bit, but overall I really really loved this.

Thoroughly enjoyable mash up of Frankenstein and Pride & Prejudice. Made me care about Mary Bennet in a way I never expected to.

It was so fun to see two of my favorite classics (and books in general) meshed together — especially with a sapphic twist. This was a really creative concept and a unique way to reimagine these stories. The narrative was surprisingly funny and never took itself too seriously, while still being respectful to the original source material. The epistolary element was interesting, though sometimes I did want more from the straightforward narrative. All in all, this was a fun, quick read.

This is just a fun, enjoyable little book that manages to effectively do a crossover between Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein while also pairing up two of Bronte's more minor characters (Mary Bennett and Georgiana Darcy). Mary ends up becoming a mad scientist to try and avoid spinsterdom with a side of feminine rage, and the whole thing plays out in letters between the two (though they are not originally aware of the other's identity). It does end happily, despite appearing like it won't, and ends up being a great read.

I was lucky enough to receive a physical copy of this book, so I'll be reading and evaluating that instead!

I grabbed this book because I LOVED Taub's last book on the Bennet family, "Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch" and this sequel did not disappoint! A fun blend of scifi and characters we know and love, I adored the depth Mary was given in this book. I always felt Mary had more to give to the story, more of her side, and this was a fantastical sciency sapphic neurospicy way to do it! I was definitely stressed by the way Mary was ignoring obvious red flags through the book-but that is pretty consistent with what we know of Mary's character, so my anger was with the character not the author. The dye concept is SO creative, I lovelovelove how it was explored. The ending felt consistent with the story and its characters, and I will not lie I may have gotten misty eyed at the end there. Truly a fun romp. Well done, Melinda.
I loved it, I'll have 15 more please.
Thank you to Taub and netgalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

I gave this book a 3.5 out of 5 stars because there were several elements I really loved and several that I struggled with, and I’ve really been struggling to put them together into a coherent review. So instead here’s a pros and cons list, based entirely and solely on my opinions and literary tastes.

Things I liked:

The Premise. Mary Bennet as Victor Frankenstein is a delightful concept, and I think the story did a really fun job fleshing out more minor Pride and Prejudice characters, particularly Mary’s relationship with her parents.

The Love Interest. It was kind of a weird choice to keep the love interest a secret, but it really paid off. Georgianna was a delightful character and worked so well as a love interest for Mary, and their arc together really improved both characters.

The Writing. Epistolary books can be really tricky to pull off, and I think this book did a good job keeping the balance between the framing of the book and actually telling the story



Things I Struggled with:

The Worldbuilding. There was a weird mix of magic and science, in a way that didn’t feel balanced to me. Mary is working in the space of alchemy, so while not science by our metric, Mary very much approaches it as a science and the narrative treats it as such. Georgianna was cursed by a witch to turn into an owl. This concept is introduced like 2/3rds of the way into the book and it not explained, expanded on, or integrated into the existing worlds building. My theory is that this somehow connects to the author’s previous book wherein Lydia Bennet is a witch, but there isn’t any other indication that this is a series, and I found the whole thing very jarring.

Mary’s “Intelligence”. We are told again and again that Mary Bennet is Very Smart, and I do believe that she’s a very good scientist. But man oh man she’s SO dumb about people, particularly in regards to Pike. I understand this was a deliberate character flaw, but I found it really really hard to read.

Pacing. The pacing of this book is really weird. The love interest doesn’t come in until halfway through the book, despite being a major part of the story in the back half. There’s a two year time skip in the last thirty pages. I had a really hard time keeping track of where we were supposed to be emotionally because of this.

All in all, I don’t think this was a bad book, but I have a lot of complicated feelings about it myself. I do think other people would like it more, which bumped my rating up a little bit. 3.5/5 stars from me, and thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.