Feb 29

Feb 29 Frankissstein: A Love Story

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love.

Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead... but waiting to return to life.

What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself.

TL;DR Review

Frankissstein — a modern-day retelling of Frankenstein mixed with some historical ficion — is absolutely fantastic. Jeanette Winterson is a literary legend for a reason.

For you if: You are here for queer stories with incredible prose.

Full Review

“I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”

OK, people. Frankissstein blew me AWAY. It’s an incredible melding and meeting of two stories — one story? three stories? — between a present-day retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and historical fiction (I would almost even call it fan fiction) featuring Mary Shelley herself. Nobody is like Jeanette Winterson. This book is a work of true raw talent.

In the 1816s, Mary Shelley is in a wet countryside cabin with her husband, Shelley; his poet friend, Lord Byron; Claire, Mary’s step sister and Byron’s mistress; and a physician, Polidori. The story of Frankenstein grips her and pours out onto the page. Flash forward to today, we have a Ry, a non-binary person who used to be called Mary. They are in love and sleeping with a doctor named Victor Frankenstein, who is trying to create eternal life through artificial intelligence. Their friends Ron Lord (seller of sex bots) and Claire are also featured.

I don’t think I can do this book justice in a review. The number of times my jaw dropped because of the connections I’d suddenly realized JW had made between the three stories … is a lot. The weird dynamic of having Ry be in love with Victor, and how that showed Mary’s obsession with her creature. Once you make something, you can’t un-make it. It exists now. Humanity’s obsession with destroying itself through preservation — or is it preserving itself through destruction? The way Ry’s trans and non-binary identity glued everything together. The way I am now OBSESSED with Mary Shelley IRL?

READ THIS.

“I have never been like you! answered the man. My madness is that I am trapped here. Outside waits one whose fiendish, pitiless cunning will instruct others to experiment as I did — without any care for the human race.
Mary Shelley said, If you are not of the human race, why should you care for it?
For the love of it that you bear, he answered. Love that you have taught me. Shall I quote our book? ‘My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy.’
She said, Those words are spoken not by Victor Frankenstein, but by his creature.
We are the same, the same, answered Frankenstein.”

Trigger Warnings

Sexual assault / rape
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Animal cruelty or animal death
Pregnancy or childbirth
Miscarriages / Death of children

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