alaterdate | Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match (Reply)

I have been reading Sally Thorne's romance novels since she debuted. So I picked up her latest novel Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match.

In this book our main character Angelika Frankenstein and her brother Victor are rich orphans obsessed with “Science!” and set out to reanimate a man. Victor wants to do it to spite a long time rival (who has already done it?? not clear) and Angelika wants to do it so she can marry her creation. Yup. So they both reanimate a man each. Victor’s man is hulking and runs off screaming into the forest, while Angelika’s man is perfectly sensible. So sensible he refuses to follow her plan to become her husband and instead makes it his goal to find out who he used to be before he woke up from the dead with amnesia and someone else’s dick sewn onto him. Yup, she swapped his dick for a bigger one and it’s a running joke. While trying to discover the reanimated man’s identity Angelika meets another man who may be her real match, especially if it turns out that her science project had a wife of his own before he died, dun dun!

The premise is fine if you don’t think too hard about it, which leads to actually reading it being a complete mess. I ended up skimming a lot….

The writing style is pretty good. I think Thorne did a great job tailoring the narrative style to the time period, especially coming from contemporary romance. There weren’t any anachronisms that annoyed me enough to remember them now that I’m sitting down to write this review. The glaring annoyance was that the dialogue was good in style, but not substance. The re-alived man, Will, immediately goes off on this worship of Angelika that’s so confusing. He keeps saying he can’t be with her then the next page he’s waxing poetic about how beautiful, smart, and talented she is and how he’d love to fuck her. But oh no he can’t. For some reason. Apparently his unconscious mind is quite powerful lol. In the beginning I was enjoying how wacky the story was and having a laugh, but it went downhill from there and I only finished it because my coworker saw me reading it and wants to know how it was.

Well, it was bad. I have such a gripe with it being described as a “re-telling” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Inspired by, sure. I wish she would have just completely made her own characters and didn’t use Victor, because—my god—what’s she’s done to him and Elizabeth is heresy. The plot is wafer thin and settled coincidentally. I think the story is really supposed to be about how Angelika becomes a better person (and finds god) and changes her mind from wanting to travel the world to becoming a good wife and mother, lmao. And what’s more it blindsides the reader with this turn for her character. I could understand the story being about her realizing that what she’d done was fucked up and that she should care more about other people. But the god and baby fever stuff just elevated this to a suspicious level. I thought this book would be my last straw with Thorne’s books because of the mangling of one of my favorite works of literature, but now it’s topped by me wondering if all her books are going to be as preachy from now on. I really don’t get what happened. Her last protagonist was the daughter of a preacher, but her parents were really shitty so I thought it was a little condemnation and now I’m just flat out confused. Besides that, the way Will would tell her that he’d never marry her and then turn around and start making out with her, then turning around and telling her he can’t be with her, then turning around and declaring he wants to be with her was extremely annoying. I didn’t want to read about any of these characters. And the guy Angelika meets that “may be her actual destiny” was so obviously going to get with the other girl, while Angelika was clearly never going to choose him so what was the point of that besides making Will even more annoying. And everything she wrote about Victor and Elizabeth made me cringe enough that I tended to just skim whenever they were around. The reveal of Will’s identity was pretty funny though; of course he was a preacher.

This book was funny at first, but quickly went downhill and I think it’s my LEAST favorite of Thorne’s books which means it is just awful because I really hated 99 Percent Mine. I’d steer clear if you have any respect for the novel Frankenstein and your very own brain.