Monstrous Beauty

Mary's Monster by Lita Judge

New York : Roaring Brook Press, 2018.

312 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

I finally got around to reading Frankenstein back in 2011, and - after reading this fine book - I want to read it again! The reason is indicated in this book's full title Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley created Frankenstein. 

Judge's book is an superb retelling of the courage, grit and brilliance of the young Mary Shelly with a focus on the years that lead to her creation of the classic novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818.  The author tells the well-researched story in easy free verse that moves the story along at a breathless clip.  We see Mary Shelly live the shock of her widowed father's remarriage to a very unlikable stepmother, her surprisingly lovely exile from family to an extended family in Scotland, and then her return and scandalous elopement with the already married Percy Bysshe Shelley - a passionate but troubled Romantic Poet.

It is during a Swiss exile with Percy and Byron that she begins writing her masterpiece. The success of this biography is that it is able to create a very clear narrative out of the tumultuous time that Mary Shelly wrote the novel. During the period covered she leaves home, returns, leaves, has two daughters who die and one son who survives, marries, is widowed, and sees her controversial novel become famous.

Additionally, the book is illustrated with evocative (haunting) illustrations of which the cover featured here is one.

I would definitely recommend this book to students.  It humanizes famous authors and makes their painful and passionate lives very real and very compelling.    

Appetizer With Chopsticks

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral
New York : Razorbill, c2012.
1 v. (unpaged) : ill.(chiefly col.) ; 25 cm.

I really like a lot about this genre-blending novel.  It combines evocative photography/images/drawings, scrapbook-like formatting, links to YouTube videos, and IM shots to create a novel/pastiche of a teen piano prodigy's disappearance, mental troubles, family backstory, and passionate love affair with a mysterious and elusive teen from Argentina.  (The flavor of the book can be sampled at its Tumblr website.)  The story is told with sparse text and the "novel" can be read in about 30 min to 1 hour - and it is compelling.   So far so good! 

But for me the novel has significant shortcomings.  The idea of unreliable narrator is carried to the next level in this book by making the visual narrative itself (images of photos, plane tickets, menus, invitations) very unreliable.  After finishing the book and wondering about the ending, I found myself looking more closely at the visual text of the book.  Contradictions and incorrect documents and dates are taken to such a point as to render the very images potentially false.   At a point I came to be so aware of being manipulated by the authors that I couldn't really enjoy the narrative of the book.  Ultimately the book seemed more interested in its technique and appearance - and lacking in heart.

All this is in some ways all right with me.  This is a book that would be fun to have several readers read and then discuss (and argue about what they think happened - or didn't happen for that matter).  I also like that the book is easy to read and yet can really get readers to question what it means to trust the narrative of a book - fiction or non-fiction.

When I checked out reviews of the book, they seem to fall into two general camps: people love the book (see Kirkus and Reading Rants) or they like the book, but ultimately find it lacking (see Oops and Never Ending Bookshelf [note spoilers]).  I'd have to say I fall into the latter camp.  I find the novel to be more of a intriguing appetizer, but not a main course that satisfies.  Nevertheless, I'll be curious to see how students react to this book.

Like Coffee with Cream...and Sugar

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler
New York : Little, Brown, 2011.
354 p. : col. ill. ; 22 cm. 

A really lovely book, that offers several creatively fresh angles on the romance that falls apart between two unlikely teens.

The first nice hook of this book is the premise.  The book is the supposed text accompanying the box of returned "artifacts" of this couple's brief love affair which is being ended by the girl after she learns of her boyfriend's secret second girlfriend.

The next appealing aspect of the book are the lovely full color paintings by Maira Kalman which begin each chapter of the book - usually being a chapter describing one item in the box and how it relates to the couple's romance and break-up. These illustrations (like the one at the top of this entry) are simple - but wonderfully colorful and evocative.  They also serve to stoke the reader's curiosity and add texture to the novel.  I often found myself gazing at them before beginning a chapter, and then looking back at them after reading the chapter.

Another strength of this book are the characters, who are richly developed and complicated.  Min Green, the girl who tells the story, is smart, irreverent, artsy and - unfortunately - naive.  Her boyfriend the popular, good looking Ed Slaterton is a jock and a bit of a cad, but is also very smart in math and clever and funny.

If I had a complaint for this book, it would be that it was a bit too long.  I felt like it lost its pace about 2/3 of the way through, and like other critics of the book I found myself being a bit annoyed with the narrator - her obsession with films and inability to see the flaws of her boyfriend get tiresome toward the end.  However, I felt like the book found its footing toward the end and I would definitely recommend it to any student looking for a book about dating, romance, first love, and break-ups.

For me this book called to mind Chbosky's Perks of Being a Wallflower and Cohn's Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.