I was given an arc of Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is hard for me to rate. The story is set in two timelines. We follow Mary Shelley’s life in the 19th century. The story starts in that notorious summer where the Shelley’s, Lord Byron and a couple companions lived together at Lake Geneva and Frankenstein was born. The book continues to follow through Percy’s death and even later in Mary’s life meeting Ada Lovelace. I really enjoyed this part of the book. I loved watching Mary’s life. I loved the themes of feminism in this section and the women being unsatisfied with their lot in life. The lack of control they have over every aspect of their lives whether education, money, children or even their own bodies. There was also all the themes of Frankenstein which connected the story to the second story line.

The second story line follows Ry and Victor, they are both in their own way are very interested in prolonging life. There is lots of discussion about cryogenics, ai, the future of humans being put into machines.There are also many discussions about sex bots. Specifically, for men. There is a lot of discussion about feminism in this section but it didn’t feel as subtle as the historical section. Ry and Victor are in a relationship. Ry is trans and that was nice to see some rep in this book but I really didn’t enjoy relationship. Victor just feels gross. He’s into Ry simply because he’s trans, to Victor some kind of in between gender that he thinks that the future of all humanity. I never bought that he loved Ry. It felt fetishy. There was also a really unnecessary assault scene that I didn't think added anything to the book.

I did enjoy how the things discussed in the Shelley sections were shown reflected in our times, like the development of computers, etc. But I really didn’t like the contemporary story line. I also felt that with the format of the arc I received I was often confused about who was talking in the contemporary plot line. So I had to read sections more than once, quite a few times.

If could rate the story lines separately I’d give the historical one a 4 and the contemporary one a 2.5 so I’ll settle for a rating of a 3.

Unfortunately, this book simply wasn't for me so I'm not going to give it a rating (but have to on here to submit my review). I didn't enjoy the beginning about Shelley, et al. and I had trouble getting into it in general. I ultimately chose not to finish it, because I just couldn't gel with it. I know it will be very popular among Winterson's die hard fans and those following the Booker Prize (congrats on it being longlisted!).

Thanks to NetGalley and and Grove Press for the free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson is hard to describe. The novel takes on a lot of topics, ranging from Mary Shelley as she wrote Frankenstein and beyond, through her husband's death. It also covers a Brexit-era somewhat alternative future where sex bots are a thing? I think the book best shines with the Mary Shelley sections. I genuinely like a lot of historical fiction I read and dislike a lot of sci-fi, so that could partly be simply my preference. But there wasn't much about the modern, sci-fi-esque stuff that worked for me.

I found the writing style a bit hard to follow. The distinct lack of punctuation was a hurdle for sure. The characters were decidedly unsubtle, too on-the-nose for any bit of nuance. Ron Lord is an ignorant bigot. It's clear from the first scene he appears in, and he takes great pains to remind us.

The themes are also heavy handed. The feminism is in your face, unnuanced. I think at some point Ron Lord asks another character if they're a "#MeToo supporter," or something of the like. We get it. It's supposed to be current times. And then there's the treatment of Ry, the trans supposed main character of this book. I can't speak to how accurate or thoughtful the trans rep in this book is, but it certainly didn't feel very thoughtful. It was about as nuanced a take as her other themes and characters in this book, if I had to guess.

I've heard great things about Jeanette Winterson, but I guess this wasn't the book to start with.

I really wish that I had read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein prior to this reimagination of that classic. I struggled a bit to fully engage with the story here but the writing is wickedly smart and funny.

Frankissstein is a thoroughly modern story. It is satirical and funny, smart and analytical. Winterson pulled together stories taking place in modern-day London, modern-day America and in the late 19th century. She tied together the story of a transgender person falling in love, a cryogenic company in America, the use of artificial intelligence and then she mixed in the original author's social life. Somehow these disparate threads tied together to create a story about love, politics, intelligence, compassion. From what I understand, in the original novel the creature is smarter and kinder and better than the human. And here Winterson did the same, showing AI as surpassing the humans that created them.

In this book we meet Ron Lord, a divorced man who lives with his mother in Wales. He creates and sells female sexbots who are programed to never say no to a man. The idea is there will be a male utopia because the bots do not cause men the problems they face with real women. Ron Lord claims that his bots solve issues of rape, assault and abuse. Dr Ry Shelley is a transgender man who is in love with a famous doctor named Victor Stein. And across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics company is preparing to bring people back to life. This book is complex and complicated. At times it felt inaccessible, then I would read one of Winterson's beautifully crafted, sardonic, thought-provoking sentences...

The aspect of the book that I most enjoyed though, dealt with gender roles and norms, gender fluidity, sexism and those expectations placed upon women. I found this storyline timely in this era of the #metoo movement.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This novel possesses all the necessary ingredients to shine for its uniqueness: an unconventional structure, an ambitious approach to storytelling, a profound meditation on themes that should appeal the most demanding of readers…
And yet.

As the title anticipates, this is a retelling of the famous novel by Mary Shelley that takes “the monster” of her creation beyond her present time to project a future where technological progress might mean the end of the world as we know it.
The “kiss” hidden among the letters of the aberrant Frankenstein is an open reference to the love stories connecting the two timelines of the novel: the first is set in 1816 at the famous villa in Lake Geneva where Mary spent time with the poets Lord Byron and her lover P.B. Shelley debating about the limits of the body in relation to the immeasurable power of the mind.
The second timeline takes place in modern London where Ry, a young transgender doctor, falls in love with Victor Stein, an iconic professor who champions artificial intelligence as the definite solution to the biggest fear that has haunted human beings since the beginning of times; the certainty of our own mortality.

As the stories move forward, the two timelines become more and more interrelated and the characters seem to jump through time and space by means of abstract concepts. Meditations on what constitutes the death of a body, or what defines a mind take the stage while social restrictions that have traditionally described people like gender, race and culture become obsolete when confronted with the upcoming challenges of the future; sex bots, cryopreserved bodies, intelligent prosthesis that question the limits between improving the quality of life or the frenzied ambition to beat death at all costs.
Where to draw the line?

This is a highly accomplished novel, ambitious in scope and creative in style. Certain sections are even brilliant, particularly the ones dealing with the historical recreation of Mary Shelley’s progression as woman and author, the evolution of her inner thoughts as her resilience is tested by the cruel passing of her children and beloved husband, and the dreamlike encounter with “her creation” in Bedlam hospital. The themes are delicately exposed, blending the pace of poetry with the depth of existential meditation.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the other timeline where the modern characters take the lead from the past. The language is shabby and hurried, dialogue is annoyingly cliched, the characters lack depth and credibility. I didn’t quite understand Winterson’s reason to include tasteless sex scenes to emphasize the duality of Ry’s sexual orientation or the cheap correlation between secondary characters and great “personalities” such as Byron, Shelley or even fictional Victor Frankenstein. More than a homage, it read like cheap mockery to me.
A real shame that these chapters diminished the pleasure of the earlier sections and devalued what could have been one of the best reads of the year to a mere “potentially-good” novel.


Note: I received an ACR of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

"I have love, but I cannot find love's meaning in this world of death. Would there be no babies, no bodies; only minds to contemplate beauty and truth. If we were not bound to our bodies we should not suffer so."

Slow down, breathe, and prepare to be transported by this book. 

Like all of Jeanette Winterson's work, this novel reads like poetry. It weaves a few narrative threads together that took this reader awhile to fully immerse myself in, but I'm glad I kept with it. It's an engaging story of mortality, evolution, the limits of the human body. Set in the future and the past, we follow the stories of many different monsters and their makers - the genesis of Mary Shelley's lasting work and the future of the human race as we know it.

It's worth flagging this novel for some brief but graphic sexual violence. It is also at times hard to follow, but I believe that may be a flaw in the Kindle version in its unpublished stages. Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was really looking forward to reading this book as I think Jeanette Winterson is an amazing writer and I had also heard her discuss the book on the radio, Sadly however I found it really difficult to get into and lost track a bit of the time shifts. I will put this down to my inabilities rather than her writing though and hope to hear more of her discussing the book so that it suddenly all clicks into place!
Thank to netgalley and Grove Atlantic for an advance copy of this book.

I honestly don't even know how to review this, but I would think if you're a fan of Jeanette Winterson already then you know what you're in for and will be pleased.

Frankissstein is a bold, bawdy, and tremendously clever creation; the first of its two storylines follows Mary Shelley as she writes Frankenstein, and the second follows a host of characters in the present-day, chronicling the love story between Ry, a transgender doctor, and Victor Stein, a scientist with a passion for artificial intelligence. The thematic interplay between these two narratives is genius, and Winterson brilliantly highlights the timelessness of the classic she’s riffing off, as themes of death, gender, and bodily limitations underscore both narratives.

But for me, the storyline in the past was the much more unique and engaging one. These chapters were just begging to be developed into a full-blown novel fictionalizing Mary Shelley, and frankly, if that’s all Frankissstein was, I’m sure I’d give it 5 stars with no reservations. Though these chapters were largely figments of Winterson’s imagination, the parallels she draws between Mary Shelley’s personal life (what we know of it, anyway) and the content of Frankenstein were incredibly stimulating.

“I have love, but I cannot find love’s meaning in this world of death. Would there were no babies, no bodies; only minds to contemplate beauty and truth. If we were not bound to our bodies we should not suffer so. Shelley says that he wishes he could imprint his soul on a rock, or a cloud, or some non-human form, and when we were young I felt despair that his body would disappear, even though he remained. But now all I see is the fragility of bodies; these caravans of tissue and bone.

At Peterloo, if every man could have sent his mind and left his body at home, there could have been no massacre. We cannot hurt what is not there.”

The issues I had with the present-day chapters were twofold: first, I found some of the philosophizing on artificial intelligence to be overwrought, and second, the humor was a series of constant misses for me. Winterson often employs humor in this novel to drive home the absurdity behind certain characters’ misogyny, but she would make her point and then continue to bash you over the head with jokes about sex-bots; it got very old for me.

In spite of this, the parallels between the two storylines were brilliantly rendered, and the overall impression I’m left with of this book is that I am very impressed, and I think this would have made a truly interesting addition to the Booker shortlist.

<i>***Longlisted for the Man Booker Award***</i>

3.5 stars

Don't be fooled by its cutesy whimsical title. Jeanette Winterson's <b>Frankissstein</b> is a clever, at times humorous novel that challenges our perception of life vs death. It confronts religion and society on how we view feminity and gender. Written in parallel timeframes:
-- 1819 a world in which Mary Shelley creates her Prometheus and
-- The Near Future where cryogenics may be able to revive the minds of men long dead --
we get to see how closely these worlds mirror one another and how far we as a society have yet to go in terms of acceptance. By juxtaposing these two moments in time Winterson also reminds us how near we are to this imagined future of AI and transhumanism. One have only to look at our present machinations of Alexa, predictive text and the use of social media to inform our individual wants and needs.

<i>Special thanks to NetGalley, Grove Press and Jeanette Winterson for advanced access to this book.</i>

It was meah. I received this book from Netgalley. I just did not care. While reading I was drifting away from it and at the beginning I was trying to reread the parts I lost but later on I just did not bother. I am not sure if it was not a correct time to pick it up or the book was not for me. I appreciate the diversity. I will though try another book from this author, cause the writing style is impressive.

A beautifully written and thought provoking read with interesting characters both real and imagined. This book has left me with lots of questions to ponder and I’m sure will keep me thinking long after I finished reading.

'The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house.'

Frankenstein re-imagined for our strange times. This novel is a shared narrative between Mary Shelley in 1816 as she gives birth to her creation of Frankenstein and modern day Dr. Shelley (Ry) who is transgender “a start-up (or is it an upstart in my own life)” who works for a cryogenics company attending the Tec-X-Po on Robotics in Memphis, Tennessee. Ry is there to interview Ron Lord (dealer of sex bots) and Ry tells us, “to consider how robots will effect affect our mental and physical health”. Claire is a ‘venue expert’ serving as Ry’s guide, but keep your eye on her, this is the last place you’d expect religion to enter. Soon enough we are sitting beside human scale ‘sex dolls’ while Ron convinces us that it’s a modern convenience, even good for couples because let’s face it folks, women lead busy lives now and men get lonely. It’s disease free, far safer than human beings! Barbie for grown ups! It’s the market of the future! Real, fake, is there a difference in the modern world? But humans as uploads?

The story takes us back into the past with Mary Shelley, where it’s far more interesting wondering about the mystery of life with Percy, Lord Byron and his physician Polidori, and mistress Claire (Mary’s step-sister). Here, another creature is given birth to, old world style when Mary pens Frankenstein. Somehow Frankenstein’s monster is less threatening, terrifying to my way of thinking than AI and the high functioning madness of Professor Victor Stein, who declares to all that, “The future is not biology it’s AI.” Just what is his terrifying, freakish theory of evolution? What sort of imagined future has him on a mission? Who better to discuss body parts than Ry, who is fully female, partly male whose love, emotions aren’t defined by either or? Of course Ry falls under Victor’s spell, a love story is born. What is the substance we love? Is it in the soul, the mind, the body? How do we define love? Hell, at this point, how do we define madness, science, religion? Love is it’s own sort of madness, monster, no? How much can Ry’s love for Victor overlook the horror of his designs? This is modern Frankenstein, where there doesn’t have to be death for humans, where the mind can live forever, become it’s technology.

At times it is incredibly thought provoking, “What is your substance”, are we body, are we soul? What are we, exactly? Is our humanity tied into our souls? Our physical parts? What if modern medicine keeps us alive, with parts that are man-made? Better yet, what if the brain could evolve elsewhere, body no longer needed? Are we no longer human? What if we were only a brain, and everything else was replaced, are we then monsters? What is AI exactly? Could we at some point, were we downloaded, be AI ourselves?

Well what did I just read? I just wanted to remain in Mary Shelley’s world, because there was the writing I loved. I think the future is too bleak for me with Professor Stein. It is meaningful in understanding Ry’s self-creation, but it really went off the rails the further I read. I am not a huge Sci/Fi fan, what kept me reading was Mary Shelley’s intelligence, very much alive in a time where women were meant to be quiet. Quiet like her step-sister who ‘has nothing to say’ beyond what her body does, a woman who ‘sleeps with anybody”. Mary, adamant that the male principle isn’t better than the female nor more active just not subjugated as women are! The men simply ‘indulging her’ and therefore underestimating her. The imaginings of Mary are the beauty of the novel, the heartache too. She knew quite a bit about death, never knowing her own mother who died from birthing complications. She herself suffered miscarriage, death of her living children, so it gives rise to many questions about where the soul goes. Maybe the book began as a game, a challenge, but here I could imagine her writing a catharsis for what plagued her heart.

I have such a hard time reviewing this story because it is bizarre but it had me thinking about the monsters we create, about science, religion, love, our bodies, how we see ourselves and each other. What sex means, how we identify, and the many ways we deny others ownership of their emotions, state of being. One thing I kept thinking, whether the monsters are in the past or modern technology, somehow women always seem to be abused or denigrated. It seems to be one constant. Such a hard novel to categorize.

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

Grove Atlantic

'Grove Press

I feel this book would especially be enjoyed by someone who had previously read Frankenstein and was familiar with Mary Shelley and her story. I would love to teach this as a supplemental book with my students as they read the traditional novel. I thought the book was especially well done and I was engaged right from the first page as I read the words written in the same style was was contemporary for the time period.

Jeanette Winterson created her very own Frankenstein 'monster'. The book mixes historical with science fiction. One part narrates a fictional story of Mary Shelley's life. These slices of life bits are fictionalized, but based on some historical material. The other section is about Victor Stein and MaRYan's love story and Artificial Intelligence.

Personally, I enjoyed the bits about Mary Shelley quite a lot. I found it fresh and it dealt with themes such as, feminism, creation, creativity, relationships as well as death. Jeanette only presents us with a few snippets of Mary's life, but those were so powerful, that in the end she was the only character I bonded with.

The main plot is about Ry, a transgender character, and his/her liaison with Victor Stein, a doctor focussing on AI, especially preserving life/knowledge after death. Ry's friend Ron also has sexbot business in Wales. Throughout the plot Ron is sort of a comic relief character, who had too much to tell, describing sexbots, how Wales has played a key roll in the Brexit vote, Christian sexbots - This was the part when Winterson lost me as a reader, it was too over the top and I couldn't be bothered with the modern days part of the book!

My problem with the characters, the gender and AI plot was that it was not a fresh take on these topics. I am very disappointed of Winterson's take on a transgender person. Is Ry the monster now? Because he/she is self constructed, just like the sexbots. It was all just too much on the surface and had absolute no depth to it. Whereas Mary's Shelleys plot lines really dug into women's roles in the early 1800s, the modern plot just left me rolling my eyes.

There is also another third part interwoven in the story, called Bedlam, but this is just a vehicle to combine both plots.

Bits and pieces - cut and sawn together - just like Frankenstein. But the monster had a heart, and this books heart is with Mary Shelley.

Frankissstein
by Jeannette Winterson
due 10-1-2019
Grove Press
5.0 / 5.0

#netgalley #Frankissstein

Remarkable and absorbing, this is a intellectual and philosophical novel and one of the best, and most relevant I've read in s long time.
Transgendered Dr. Ry Shelley, living in Britain, falls in love with Victor Stein, a professor of Artificial Intelligence. It made me stop, think and consider so many times about so many things.
What is it that makes us human?
Are our assigned bodies and gender what make us human or is what we do, think and feel , that seperate us from Artificial Intelligence, or just from each other?
Is it our desire for more pleasure that drives, are we all just robots programmed by our ownselves?
Beautifully written, we can see the criticisms and beliefs Mary Shelley encountered while writing this in 1816. It reflects the same beliefs and criticisms we are still encountering today.
Ron Lord and his SexxBots and XXBots were one of the best parts, with its Teledildonics, the intelligent vibrator. There is much wit, humor and whimsy in this amazing novel of gender, gender equality and humanity. We are, indeed, much more than the sum of our parts.
Thanks to netgalley for this e-book ARC for review.

I requested this book because I am a big fan of Mary Shelley , her Gothic style and writing sensibilities .

But , unfortunately I couldn't get into this book . I enjoy offbeat and quirky books but this one turn out to be just just weird and a bit confusing ... plus I have difficulties connecting with it.

I might be , it's me not the book , situation here.



I just reviewed #Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson courtesy of #NetGalley

Jeanette Winterson's Frankisstein is a glorious, smart, thought-provoking, ultra-female novel. Her lush prose and wild imagination never fails to captivate, but Frankisstein and her recent Gap of Time are especially stunning adaptations of classics, Frankenstein and The Winter's Tale respectively. She takes on the cyber near-future and the ethics of technology in such a creative way, mashing up love and machinery to address some of the most serious questions we face, and she does it with her trademark frank sensuality. As with Salman Rushdie's new take on Don Quixote, Quichotte, Winterson braids together parallel narratives that had this reader reconsidering Victor Frankenstein, his monster, and his creator. I couldn't put it down. Frankenstein is a vacation for overwhelmed, overwrought 2019 brains. It's food for the curious mind, the lover of literature, the monster-phile. A thousand stars..

This story was incredibly difficult to follow IMHO. I appreciated that this one takes on a lot of hot button issues, non-binary individuals, artificial intelligence, the use and abuse of technology etc...but at the end of the day this was a let down.
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this arc available through netgalley.

I think I'm just not quite the right audience for Jeanette Winterson; only after finally managing to get through this book did I realize I had similar feelings and thoughts about some of her other titles. Most of this book reminded me of those obnoxious, pretentious friends in college who would get drunk and have self important philosophical debates about politics or existentialism. 80% of this book just seemed to be barely described cardboard cutout characters debating a subject and almost always without any type of punctuation or separation of the dialogue in order to easily be able to follow. Aside from the very first few "Mary Shelley" parts, this was a headache of a book to try to read. I felt no attachment to any of the characters and it just didn't read to me as a cohesive story. I would say it felt more like an overly-long play with single-location chapters comprised of mostly 2 (sometimes 4) characters debating. Judging by the other glowing reviews for this book, I'm completely of the minority opinion but that's life I suppose.