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

I read this wonderful book in one sitting. It contains many facts that I did not know about Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein. Pregnant at the age of sixteen, her father and step mother insisted that she leave their house. The father of her child was the poet Percy Shelly. A romantic, he

stole her heart, but as she traveled with him, she began to realize how emotionally unstable he was.

Through the many indiscretions, outbreaks of insanity, and the constant need to flee from his massive debts, the situation was never stable. Still, she loved him and continued to be with him.

Throughout the years, she met other poets, including Lord Byron, also a person of ill repute and emotional instability, and like Shelly, he was filled with ideas that were not grounded in a life of stability and conformity.

As she aged and overcame adversity, she became stronger. Weaving the tale of Byron who was insistent that man could be recreated by providing an electric current to the dead body, she made her own thoughts, and developed her own ideas for what would become the masterful Frankenstein

Women receiving little, if any recognition, she had to look on as her book became a play and reached increasing audiences, people did not know that it as a woman who wrote about a man made with various parts, and stitched together.

The book is the story of how Mary overcame adversity and poured her pain and grief into making a masterpiece. Published in 1811, her creative book is still a very well-known tale and holds the interest of thousands.

Illustrated with black, grey and white illustrations, this is an incredible story of a tale longing to be told.

Five Stars!

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LibraryThing member JLSlipak

A young adult biography of Frankenstein’s profound young author, Mary Shelley, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of its publication, told through free verse and 300+ full-bleed illustrations.

Mary Shelley first began penning Frankenstein as part of a dare to write a ghost story, but the seeds

of that story were planted long before that night. Mary, just nineteen years old at the time, had been living on her own for three years and had already lost a baby days after birth. She was deeply in love with famed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a mad man who both enthralled and terrified her, and her relationship with him was rife with scandal and ridicule. But rather than let it crush her, Mary fueled her grief, pain, and passion into a book that the world has still not forgotten 200 years later.

Dark, intense, and beautiful, this free-verse novel with over 300 pages of gorgeous black-and-white watercolor illustrations is a unique and unforgettable depiction of one of the greatest authors of all time.

MY THOUGHTS:

I received this book in exchange for my honest review!

I absolutely loved this story! It was incredibly fascinating and even heart-breaking at times. Mary Shelley’s early life was difficult and a bit sordid. I was invested in this story from the very beginning and the artwork! Let’s just say, it’s beautiful, gothic, dark, mesmerizing and stunning! I had problems with the first-person narrative that is written in verse, but after a while got used to it. It kept me engaged in the story from beginning to end. This extraordinary woman had quite the life and her story is based on diaries Mary left behind.

Mary possesses a progressive viewpoint about society and doesn’t care much for traditional values and you can see these influences in her writing. Sadly, there’s a nasty stepmother element who makes Mary suffer terribly prompting Mary to elope with Shelley, a poet, at the young age of sixteen.

Throughout this book you feel Mary’s anger and despair, her emotions tie up in knots over being betrayed, and that betrayal shattering her dreams. There’s a whole barrage of emotional whirlwinds involved in this book and I’m sure anyone reading it will enjoy the story right to the end.
The girl and the monster don’t match, but the girl and the monster’s emotions do.

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LibraryThing member sylliu

I wish I could give more than 5 stars to this powerful account of Mary Shelley and the story of her coming to create Frankenstein at the age of seventeen, the story of her turbulent affair at age sixteen with Percy Shelley, a tortured poet and married man, and the many tragedies that befell her and

her family, the story of passion and pain and creativity.

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LibraryThing member rgruberhighschool

RGG: Beautiful depiction of the life of Mary Shelley -- written in verse and illustrated. Complex references to Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Byron.

LibraryThing member SumisBooks

I read this book twice in one sitting and by the time I was done tears were streaming down my face!
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the strongest women I have ever read about. And through it all she is still remembered and will be forever immortalized through her masterpiece. For all the hurt

that she felt, for everything she had lost, for all the pain she had to endure... her work, her Adonis, her magnum opus is still being rewritten, televised, immortalized on the silver screen, and celebrated over 200 years later. Her story is not only a cautionary tale for society but is also debated in classrooms and even science labs to this very day.
While this book doesn't go truly into depth of her life, it paints such a clear picture of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley that by the end of the book your heart seems to be bleeding for the character that you have just read about and for the monster that she had created which was, indeed, herself incarnate.
The illustrations give you a clear and precise picture of both Mary and her monster as well as the world that Mary struggles to live in. The artwork is beautiful and the fact that it is black and white yet looks like watercolor paintings give the book a Gothic yet classic feel. They complement the book in such a way that I don't think any other artwork or photographs could possibly have done.
This book made me feel things that I haven't felt in over a decade. This book made me feel alive as if I were a young aspiring writer again. Back when I believed that love was the only thing worth living for and that poetry could change the world. And here I see that Mary made that all true. Lita Judge's writing of Mary paints such a true and deep portrait of her that I connected to Mary in a way that is unprecedented. I felt it so deep in my soul that I feel that I need to pick up a pen and start writing again and that more needs to come out or else I will simply burst. I feel as if I want to use this book as a teddy bear to hug at night when I go to sleep I love it so much. To put it bluntly, this book has inspired me!
I would go on but I think I've said enough. This book is more than worth a read.
I highly recommend this book.

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LibraryThing member LoriFox

What an amazing book! I love how the story of Mary Shelley and her creation of her Creature, eventually known as Frankenstein, is told through short, descriptive poem-like letters from Mary’s journals. Upon reading them, the reader can see how the events of Mary’s life were coalesced into

Mary’s Creature, who like Mary was motherless and existed on the fringes of society.

Meticulously researched, the book has a bibliography with over 20 entries. What caught my attention most, aside from the writing, are the black and white water-colored pages illustrating the poems. Much emotion is conveyed though her words.

On a side note, only upon reading the afterword did I realize that Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, were early feminists and founders of the feminist movement.

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LibraryThing member Crazymamie

This completely blew me away. It arrived today, and I sat down with it to get a feel for it, and I just read straight through it without stopping or getting up. It is stunning. It's the story of Mary Shelley and of how she came to write [Frankenstein], but it is told in poetry, and the

illustrations are gorgeous and haunting. And she got everything right. It has been meticulously researched and has fabulous endnotes. I read [Romantic Outlaws] by Charlotte Gordon several years ago, and it tells the stories of both Mary Shelley and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (highly recommended if you are interested), so I am familiar with the histories of both women and of Mary Shelley's father William Godwin. Lita Judge, the author and illustrator of this beautiful 300 page graphic biography, nails it

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LibraryThing member msf59

I highly recommend this beautifully written and illustrated volume. I learned a lot about [[Mary Shelley]]'s difficult life, especially her early years. Probably one of the best GNs, I have read since [A Monster calls].

LibraryThing member quondame

A moody dank biography of how Mary Shelley's early life and relationships formed her and her creature. It is a strong, passionate telling, but the passions told are all fraught and dark, which no doubt they were, but not the whole. I rated it as I did because all the faces were the same face.

Whether it's the only face the author can draw or a point was being made, I was annoyed by it every page after the first dozen.

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LibraryThing member sarahamlin

Personal Reaction: I enjoyed this book immensely. The illustrations are dark and gloomy. I
have always liked the story of Frankenstein. I also like that a woman created and wrote a book
when women writing was not received well by the public, but a woman writing “horror” was
shocking. I liked this

book so much that it is the subject of my book-trailer assignment.
Curricular Connections: (with Teks) I would read this book around Halloween. Before reading
the book we would discuss, as a class, our prior knowledge of Frankenstein. After reading the
novel we would discuss why Mary created the monster.
RULE §110.6 English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 4
(8) Multiple genres: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts--
literary elements. The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across
increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts. The student
is expected to:
(B) explain the interactions of the characters and the changes they undergo;

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LibraryThing member m.belljackson

What an incredible, terrifying, sad, and oddly redemptive volume!

The dark and compelling illustrations carry readers as deeply as the poetic story of love, life, hatred, art, and death.

LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd

This heavily illustrated fictional memoir of Mary Shelley's life and the creation of her literary masterpiece is well worth the relatively short time it takes to read. Not a true graphic novel, as the illustrations could be removed without leaving any holes in the story, but its visual impact is

just as powerful as the free verse narrative. I knew almost nothing of Mary Shelley's life story, other than what everybody "knows" about how she came to write [Frankenstein], and the fact that her mother, [[Mary Wollstonecraft]], was a very early feminist. Grim does not begin to describe young Mary's treatment by her own father and later by her beloved Percy Shelley and her half-sister, Claire. Tragic losses and betrayals punctuate her life, leaving her bereft and guilt-ridden. If you want to believe that great art arises from such pain, here is some pretty hefty support for that belief. If you're fond of the work of Byron and Shelley, you might want to avoid reading this in case you discover what pissants they really were. Otherwise, recommended.

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