Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout

 This story reimagines the young life of Mary Shelley at the time leading to the creation of her literary masterpiece, Frankenstein.

It alternates between two timelines set apart by four years.

1816: Mary, with others, visits Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. It’s a circle of writers and poets that spend the evenings exchanging ghost stories. One night, Byron suggests that each writes a ghost story. While Mary muses over her tale, it reminds her of another summer, when she was fourteen.

1814: Mary is sent by her family from London to Dundee, Scotland, where she stays at Baxter family. She quickly becomes friends with Isabella Baxter, the younger of two daughters. They spend hours together wandering through the nature and conjuring stories about mythical creatures.

Baxter family has tradition of story night every second Friday of the month. There is a regular visitor to those evenings. It’s Mr. Booth, who is Isabella’s brother-in-law. From the first encounter, Mary notices something strange about him. At first impression, he looks handsome, but as she looks longer at him, it’s like his face takes another form. One evening, Mr. Booth tells a story of demonstration he saw years earlier when a corpse was more or less brought to life by electrical stimuli.

I enjoyed the character of Mary more in the timeline when she is fourteen, still innocent and discovering the world around her. In the later timeline, Mary already feels old and sounds older than her age and is grieved by the loss of her child. I found this timeline more dramatic.

Overall, it is an interesting story and written by a talented writer.

Release date: October 3, 2023

Source: HarperVia