Sally Thorne - Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match

 

So, Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match was a disappointment. The premise could not have been cooler: Victor's sister, wanting to upstage her brother, makes her own creature out of spare parts at the morgue. She expects him to fall in love with her, but he has ideas of his own.

If you can get past the body horror, I think it's raises quite interesting questions around mind-body dualism and sentience and authorship and all that good stuff. The sex could've been interesting, too - who hasn't wondered what sex would be like with the reanimated dead?? Also Angelika sewed on larger muscles and a huge dick - but the protagonists remained chaste until the last pages. So bleh.

About 80% of the novel is, instead, about Will's (Angelika's creation) quest to find out about his former life. He turned out to be a priest, which was at odds with the Frankensteins' cynical atheism (again another interesting philosophical question not discussed in greater detail).

I think there was some attempt to give Angelika character development, but she remained pretty much  a shallow and quite annoying character throughout.

Incidentally we watched Ruby Sparks around the same time and it dealt with a similar premise: falling in love with your own creation. I thought Ruby Sparks was much better.

Overall I feel like Angelika Frankenstein would please only Sally Thorne's fans rather than those new to her work. (I didn't like The Hating Game when I read it last year and gave up at 20%, so maybe that should've been an indication...)