Radical Change | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge

Roaring Brook Press, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1626725003

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

After the flood of books about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley that accompanied the bicentennial of the first publication of the book last year, despite my fascination with both, I was pretty exhausted from reading about them by the time 2019 rolled around, but Mary’s Monster is something special. This verse biography of Mary Shelley’s life is framed by imagined commentary from the Creature itself. While in a text-only format this might not have worked, nearly every page is also a visual feast, pairing Lita Judge’s free verse with incredible black-and-white watercolor illustrations, for nearly 300 pages. The powerful illustrations integrated into the text reminded me at times of A Monster Calls, but that is a fictional prose novel, while this is nonfiction– a detailed verse biography. Judge structured the book into nine parts, to represent the nine months it took Mary to finish writing Frankenstein, and also the same length as a pregnancy. Mary’s thoughts about creation, love, abandonment, despair, and destruction were central to her identity, and she certainly dealt with all of these issues in her own life, from the death of her mother in giving birth and difficult childhood, to her intense relationship with Percy Shelley and her own pregnancy.

In introducing her, the Creature presents her as a complex character, outspoken and imaginative, and commands us to “hear her voice”. Indeed, even though they are not necessarily all direct quotes, the poems in the book are all told from Mary’s point of view, and Judge has pages of notes at the end identifying where she found individual lines. We hear Mary’s voice as shaped by Judge’s perceptions, choices, and words. Through Part 7, we get a relatively straightforward narrative of Mary’s life from childhood through the summer at the Villa Diodati, during which she started writing Frankenstein. Part 8 starts with the suicides of her half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife Harriet and expresses her intense grief over their deaths and the early death of her first daughter in a nightmarish, Goya-esque collage of her internal turmoil, the responses of the very tangible Creature she creates, and the way the two of them are twisted together: he claiming “I am your creature,” and her return revelation, “My creature is me!”

This is not a light read. Mary Shelley’s life was intense, passionate, and difficult, and while Judge doesn’t go into the details, she doesn’t shy away from writing about sexual relationships, suicide, children dying, drug use, and bad reputation (as opposed to a recent children’s book that described Mary visiting the Villa Diodati with “her dear friend Percy Shelley”). Judge omits any mention of Mary’s wedding to Shelley after Harriet’s suicide, which is, to me, a confusing thing to leave out, although I will grant that it wouldn’t have contributed well to the flow of Part 8, which is focused on Mary’s anger and grief (Judge explains her reasoning in an author’s note). In addition to an author’s note and the notes on the poems, Judge also provides additional information about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein following the book’s initial publication; thumbnail descriptions of the lives of major characters and family members, such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron; a list of books that Mary had read, according to her journal; and a bibilography. It’s not everything you want to know about Mary Shelley, but it’s a great place to start. Mary’s Monster is a breathtaking look at Mary Shelley’s younger years (Part 9 ends in 1823, and she lived until 1851), and, although it is targeted at YA audiences, I highly recommend it as a unique title that does an outstanding job of melding poetry, biography, art, and literary criticism into a powerful, magnetic, visually compelling, and well-researched story.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Gemina (The Illuminae Files_02) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrated by Marie Lu

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2016

ISBN-13: 978-0553499155

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Gemina is the sequel to Illuminae. Illuminae is framed by a trial in which a dossier of information is submitted as part of an investigation into a megacorporation’s criminal activity. The dossier begins by telling a story about a commando attack on an illegal civilian mining colony owned by the Wallace Ulyanov Corporation (WUC) on Kerenza IV, a planet out in the middle of nowhere, by a competing megacorporation, BeiTech. A Terran Authority ship, the Alexander, that arrived in response to a distress call, and two other ships, the Hypatia and the Copernicus, escaped with many of the refugees on board. However, their ability to communicate and to travel with any speed was handicapped by damage to the ships, and especially the incredibly complex AI, called AIDAN. When AIDAN was rebooted, its perceptions of what was best for the ships caused serious damage and destruction, and the death of many of the refugees. At the end of Illuminae, the Alexander and the Copernicus have both been destroyed through a combination of a bioweapon Beitech released before the residents of the colony fled and AIDAN’s frequently homicidal choices, and the Lincoln has also been destroyed. The primary characters from that book are teenagers Kady and Ezra. Kady is an anti-authoritarian hacker genius who is able to set up a partnership with AIDAN. Ezra is her ex-boyfriend, who has been drafted as a fighter pilot.

Gemina picks up with Hypatia limping through space toward a jump point, a wormhole that would allow them to get to a jump station, Heimdall, which sits in the midst of a number of jump points and makes transit from one place to another through the jump points faster and easier. They’re desperately hoping that Heimdall is picking up their radio transmissions and coming to the rescue. Unfortunately, a BeiTech spy is embedded in the communications staff at Heimdall, and has been destroying any transmissions, so no one on Heimdall has any idea that any ship is on the way, or even that anything happened on Kerenza IV. A transmission did, however, make it through from the crippled BeiTech ship, the Lincoln, alerting top executive Leanne Frobisher that BeiTech’s coverup isn’t as complete as she thought it was.

On Heimdall, Hanna Donnelly, the station commander’s daughter, is chatting up her drug dealer , Nik Malikov, while she prepares to make a splash at a Terra Day celebration she will be attending with her handsome, romantic, boyfriend, Jackson. Hanna may look like a fashionable, spoiled, and very privileged girl, but she’s also highly trained in strategy and martial arts (this apparently is how she spends quality time with her dad). Nik, in the meantime, has also been contacted by someone who wants to move a box of contraband into the station. A member of a family famous for their criminal dealings, he lives on the station without documentation so he can’t be easily tracked. The box arrives late, and Nik leaves to sell Hanna “dust,” the designer drug of the moment, so he’s not there when the box opens to reveal a heavily armed commando team hired by BeiTech to prevent the escape of the Hypatia, that starts its reign of terror on the station by killing almost every other member of Nik’s family.

The commandos storm the atrium, where the majority of Heimdall’s residents are celebrating Terra Day, and kill Hanna’s father. Hanna, waiting for Nik to show up, is saved because he’s late getting to her. Of all the people on Heimdall, they are the only two who have the combined luck and skill to combat the killers that have overtaken the station. It’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, complicated by the emotions, perceptions, and decisions of people who are not what they seem. There are stone-cold killers, spies, hackers, lovers, literal bloodsucking monsters (lanima, the source of “dust”), and evil corporate executives; there are betrayals, grief, confusion, anger, and fear; there is weird science, love, and hope in the face of horror.

Hanna and Nik, along with Nik’s hacker cousin Ella, discover the plan to eliminate the Hypatia and eventually the Heimdall, get through to the Hypatia, and with the help of Kady Grant and the remains of AIDAN on the Hypatia, manage to save many lives on the Heimdall, nearly destroy reality, save the universe, and escape through the wormhole to rendezvous with the Hypatia. Unfortunately, the wormhole is destroyed in the process, leaving the survivors of both Kerenza IV and the Heimdall far from home, and with limited options.

As with the first book, Gemina’s storytelling is unconventional, involving screenshots of messages and chats, emails, transcripts of video clips (with commentary) text designed as part of illustrations, showing movement or space, soliloquies by AIDAN, and artwork from Hanna’s journal (the journal artwork was created by Marie Lu) Page design is such an essential part of the way the book is written that I don’t think the story could be told effectively in a more traditional way. I highly recommend reading a hardcover edition: paperback won’t have the same detail and Kindle and audiobook cannot possibly do this justice.

Gemina suffers from an issue that affects many “middle” books in trilogies: while it doesn’t end in the middle of a sentence, it does end rather suddenly, leaving the reader with an unsatisfactory feeling of “wait, what happens next?” It’s also a very different book from Illuminae, much more of a horror/science fiction thriller. Hanna, Nik, and Ella are all very strong characters who developed considerably beyond their original stereotypical presentations during the story, and they’re up against the commandos, with few adults to monitor them, instead of the considerably more operatic first book with its mass murders, evacuations, space battles, military crackdowns, bioweapon-infected cannibals, and homicidal AI, in which Kady and Ezra are very much treated as teens in need of supervision. Yet the ending seemed anticlimactic, more written to lead into the third book than to finish the second. I enjoyed meeting Hanna, Nik, and especially snarky, tough, Ella (it’s great to see a disabled character portrayed as multidimensional and valued as a person) and am interested in seeing how the interactions of the people from the Heimdall and those of Kerenza IV play out in volume 3. Recommended.