Friday, March 23, 2018

Review: Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein

Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this nonfiction artistic kinda poetry book! I also love books that are difficult to stick into a genre, like this one.

I have never read Frankenstein because it's wordy and boring and gross. Don't try to convince me otherwise. I also hated Lord Byron and Percy Shelley's poetry in my college English classes. English Romantic Poetry is THE WORST.

See why I'm surprised that I loved this book?

When I used to teach English (even the parts I hated), I always told my students that these Romantic poets were the boy bands and teen crushes of their times. This book goes into that--they threw conventional love out the window and had affairs like crazy. Opium was everywhere, and they wrote poetry and lived in hovels but somehow survived. But not for very long, since they all didn't grow to be very old.

Mary ran away with Percy at the tender age of 16, moved all over Europe, had babies, and put up with the man she loved sleeping with her friends and sisters. Her live was ROUGH--no wonder she wrote about monsters. I love how the author didn't mince words about Mary's poor choices.

The artwork is haunting and eerily expressive. Some of the poetry I loved, but other pages really should have been written in prose (that's the bad thing about books written in verse).

My favorite poem? "Want" on page 89.

I hope to see this on a lot of YALSA best lists this year.

View all my reviews

No comments: