A Monster's Notes

A remarkable creation a baroque opera of grief laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity. The Washington PostNow in paperback the bold genre-defying book that asked: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein''s monster at all but had met him when she was a girl of eight sitting by her mother''s grave and he came to her unbidden? In a riveting mix of fact and poetic license Laurie Sheck gives us the monster in his own words: recalling how he was made and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him; pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with Mary''s (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates); taking notes on all aspects of human striving--from Gertrude Stein to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him and to find his own freedom of mind.