Longlisted for the 2019 Booker PrizeThis is another of the books some of us will be discussing face to face, so once again the review is in spoiler tags (now removed!):This book is clever, readable and very funny, if sometimes baffling. It is inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the story of its creation, but also by recent developments in artificial intelligence and the concentration of money and power in the hands of ever smaller elites. There are several layers of story, which are mixe...

Entertaining, but a characterization of a trans person that swings between mildly to wildly offensive - and that's setting aside that the only person of colour in the entire book is a two-dimensional racist stereotype. That Winterson is promoting this book about a trans protagonist by arguing against healthcare for trans teens is especially odious.

Frankenstein reanimatedPart fictionalised life story of Mary Shelley, part bonkers ‘mad scientist’ caper set in the five-minutes-from-now future, Frankissstein is riotously funny, philosophically rich, and one-of-a-kind.Lake Geneva, 1816. 18-year-old Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori and Clair Clairmont are holed up during a storm. They pass the time with ghost stories and talk of galvanism, consciousness, and loom-smashing Luddites, as Shelley begins

What an unexpected mid-winter highlight. After casting aside all my "should-be" reading books I decided to bust my way out of a reading slump by picking up this new book by Jeanette Winterson - an author I have never read. This was a particularly risky undertaking given my recent tussle with another author who also decided to play with robots ( I am not saying that book spectacularly failed but it wasn't great ).Winterson's novel is a delightful treat for readers who have ever wondered about the...

Delighted to see this on the Booker Longlist!A breathtakingly brilliant re-interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for our modern age of troubled political turbulence, so incredibly funny, smart, philosophical and satirical, weaving threads from the past, present and the impact of AI developments in the future. Jeanette Winterson has pulled off a scintillating and incisive retelling of the classic novel that posits that homo sapiens is far from the most intelligent force on earth, and prov...

Have you ever read a book where you have to keep re-reading paragraphs or even entire pages not because your mind drifted and you don't know what you just read, but because you do know what you read and it delighted you so much that you simply have to read it again? I haven't come across many writers who do that for me. Jeanette Winterson is an exception and Frankissstein is one of those books. Reading this book gave my brain a fantastic jolt on just about every page, a flood of dopamine and ser...

Funny, deeply humane and quite thought provoking”Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.”General storylineCertainly better written than the original in my opinion. Jeanette Winterson follows Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley when she writes Frankenstein and mixes this with a reimagining of this tale set in a tomorrow obsessed with AI, robotics and immortality.I especially liked the parts relating the story of Mary Shelley and what her inspirations could have been to write Frankenstein. She

Now re-read, and with additional detail in my review, following its longlisting for the 2019 Booker Prize. “I am what I am. But what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live with doubleness”“What is your substance, whereof you are made,That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” The book takes place in two timelines: The first starts in 1816. in the rainy mid-year months in Geneva – a bored group of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, her then lover and future husband Percy Shelley, Mary’s step...

Imaginative fiction pulling from a variety of sources. Notably Mary Shelley, the person, Frankenstein, the book, concept, and character, and a hodgepodge of hot topics, such as technology, transgender issues, and Brexit. Think queer theory and postmodernism applied to Frankenstein. Then apply Frankenstein to sex dolls.The idea is fantastic and is well-executed most of the time. Probably not intended for casual summer reading, however. If I were in the middle of writing a thesis on Frankenstein,

Now Nominated for the Booker Prize 2019 This novel is Winterson's monster: Pieced together from the history of Mary Shelley writing the classic Frankenstein, the plot of aforementioned classic and a new storyline focusing on artificial intelligence, Winterson has unevenly sewn together different components and brought them to life - well, at least partly. The author is a God-like figure in her own narrative universe, so you could argue that Winterson is also a "modern Prometheus" (which is the s...

Okay I waited as long as I could to give in and read this ARC. I read all 352 pages on the night which also happened to be Jeanette Winterson's 60th birthday. She interweaves Mary Shelley with a 21st century transgender doctor named Ry - both are obsessed in different ways with concepts of bodies and creation. Themes of gender, found families, sex, creation, and love flow throughout but it's delightful to read and I devoured it. Please keep Winterson for the short list, Man Booker judges.I recei...

DNF @ page 209Nothing against the book at all, I’m just not the right audience for it. Also I’m unwell at the moment and my tolerance level is much lower than it would usually be.A couple of quotes I liked. “The body can be understood as a life support for the brain.” “Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.”

What the fuck did I just read? How the fuck did this get published? And, in what fucking universe does shit like this get longlisted for an award? There’s some small justice in that this travesty of fiction didn’t make the Booker shortlist, but that it got published – and that anybody feels it worth celebrating – is still a mystery.I hated this book.Let’s start with the surface flaws. This is a badly written book. Badly written, boring, pretentious, stream-of-consciousness nonsense. It’s not jus...

When Jeanette Winterson steps into the mind of Mary Shelley, and her creature(s), we are likely to be off on a rollercoaster poetry slam in prose. I don't know what it is with Jeanette Winterson, but she manages to have her very personal story interwoven with the most universal human questions while focusing mainly on the power of the magical sentence structure to convey meaning.In a way, this is a highly contemporary reflection on where humanity is heading, philosophically and technologically s...

NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER LONGLIST.Mary Shelly’s classic novel is about the creation of life. The creation of a creature made of multiple body parts, brought to life with a bolt of electricity. This novel deals not so much with creation, but with the transference of consciousness to a digital form enabling humanity to cheat death, to attain immortality. However, this is a massive simplification of the narrative, it is so much more, and deals with many issues that are hot topics today, It doe...

To me, this book is an example of fictional instrumentalism in action — fiction written for the purpose of teaching the reader, as opposed to fiction as art. While on some level all fiction is imbued with meaning, some writing is more blunt in its messaging — and as a result, less effective in my opinion.Told in two parallel narratives, the story follows Mary Shelley in the 19th century as she grapples with the genesis of Frankenstein, as well as “Ry Shelley” in the present day, a trans doctor i...

This novel possesses all the necessary ingredients to shine for its uniqueness: an unconventional structure, an ambitious approach to storytelling, a profound meditation on themes that should appeal the most demanding of readers…And yet. As the title anticipates, this is a retelling of the famous novel by Mary Shelley that takes “the monster” of her creation beyond her present time to project a future where technological progress might mean the end of the world as we know it. The “kiss” hidden a...

4.5★“Yeah, you can be old, you can be ugly, you can be fat, smelly, you can have an STD, you can be broke. Whether you can’t get it up, or you can’t get it down, there’s an XX-BOT for you. Public service. I tell you, it is. Do you think I might get an MBE? Mum would love that.”Well, that was certainly different! Even for Winterson, whom I always enjoy, this was an inventive, imaginative blend of past, present, and future. It is also a cautionary tale of “be careful what you wish for”.The speaker...

I am disappointed and deeply uncomfortable. yikes. I am not trans so please take my review with a grain of salt, but dear god. at best, this book is irresponsibly and deeply clueless, and in bad taste. at worst, it's vaguely terfy. why does a cis woman who does not even understand the most basic things about gender - such as "trans men are men" "being trans and being gay is not the same" and "being trans is not inherently about feminism" - think that she can write a book about gender with a tran...

jesus christ this was a mess - and jeanette winterson is one of my favourite writers! written on the body is such an important book to me and doesn’t rely on binary understandings of gender and romance that rocked my entire world in the best way. surprisingly, the most redeeming part of this book for me was the reimagining of mary shelley and the silly actual frankenstein references. i found the narrative arcs overall were engaging, kind of in the way White Teeth by Zadie Smith is, but much pulp...