Title:
Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters
Author:
Suzanne Weyn
Publisher:
Scholastic
Rating:
WARTY!
Here's a good rule of thumb by which to measure all pretenders to the throne of Mary Shelley (whether you think she deserves the throne or not!) and indeed to the throne of all "classical" writers: ask yourself is something Shelley herself might have written (substitute Bronte, Austen, Shakespeare, etc. as inappropriate). If it isn't, then this is merely a pretense, not a pretender! I think what we have here ladies and gentlemen, is a sad, sad, sad pretense. I managed to get through this whole novel for two reasons only: it's short, and the gaffs are so utterly brain-dead that it makes for unintentionally amusing reading.
I hadn't read any Weyn until this one, nor will I ever again! I found myself wondering if she made so much money from this novel that she bought a large house and named it Weyn Mansion?! Maybe it’s not pronounced Wayne, but wien or wein? I don’t know! What am I rambling about?! So I started delving into Weyn's World (yeah, I went there!), and found it entertaining to begin with, but more and more problematical as I progressed (or regressed if you like). Eventually it went so far downhill that it must have joined an underground movement (if not a bowel movement). Weyn quite clearly lives in a world of her own, fashioned entirely for laziness and convenience, where a boat can appear on the horizon, heading into port, and then literally a few seconds later is tooting its horn and passengers are running to board before it departs! She also invented a new verb: bouldering, which is when stones are lining a cart track: "...stones were bouldering the lane" or words to that effect. I am not making this up.
This style Weyn employs of having the chapters be diary entries written by the twins by turn, was annoying, especially since the twins were interchangeable despite their supposed differences. It wasn't readily discernible who had the voice unless you really paid attention, and rest assured that if I as a reader already detest first person PoV, how much worse is it when there are two 1PoVs?! Weyn doesn't write badly from a technical PoV, and she quite evidently did zero research for this novel as she herself pretty much admits (more on this later). The novel will back me up one this, and there quickly arose multiple problems with plotting and credibility by the time I was about fifty percent in. I found multiple items which exercised my eyebrows rather efficiently, including her use of the term 'verdant green' on page 23. Her editor needs to tell her that such use constitutes a tautology. The hell with it, she needs to fire (more on this later!) her editor and get someone who knows what they're doing.
The word, 'biology' was only just coming into use by 1815 when this novel is set, so it’s unlikely it would have become widely known by then as Weyn pretends it is. Since one of the daughters is a scientist, it’s certainly possible she would know it, but it seems to me that it would have been a better writing exercise to have her explain it to the person to whom she's talking in order to convey how new it was. There are also several examples of anachronism in the writing (such as using the word 'formulas' instead of 'formulae', the latter being a form which I believe would have been more likely to have been in use back then, but that's just me).
On to the story. Giselle and Ingrid von der Wein (see, I told you!) are twins. Here’s another example of why I don’t review covers: not only do authors have little or no say in the cover unless they self-publish, the cover illustrators tend to be clueless about the novel they're, er, covering! I'm convinced (by a wealth of evidence) that cover artists pretty much never read the books they illustrate. In this case, I don’t know if they grabbed the first twins they found, or if they had only one girl and took two photos of her, but the girls on the cover have hair that's nothing like what’s described in the text.
I originally didn't think that the odd-looking "castle" on the cover was worth getting into (so to speak), but Weyn describes it in the text as having been originally built by Vikings, which means the cover illustration for the castle is also completely wrong. The Vikings didn’t build too many castles - not in the way we typically envision a "castle", and certainly not like the one on the cover. They commonly built earthworks with wooden palisades, and where they did build with stone, it doesn’t sound like it was anything on the scale that Weyn describes (and the cover shows), but this is fiction (and it's the cover, anyway), so I'm not going to worry too much about that since the cover is ultimately irrelevant.
Back to the topic of the twins! I found it a bit odd that they were depicted as being so different. Yes, I know that twins - even identical ones such as these - aren't exact clones (not even clones are exact clones!), and certainly they shouldn't be expected to be so, but I found it a bit much to see Weyn repeatedly remarking as to how different they were. Yes, they'd spent time apart, but not huge amounts and not during their formative years, and since a rather frighteningly large part of who we are and what we do is tied to our DNA, I’d expect far more similarities than differences. Again, this alone is not a show stopper, but my real issue with this is: why make them twins if you want them to be such distinct individuals? I initially thought that Weyn had some purpose in doing this, but no, she didn't. More on this anon.
As the title suggests, this novel riffs off Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (first published in 1818) which I've actually never read all the way through (at least I don’t think I have!), although it's coming up next on my audio book list, and I think I'll do Bram Stoker's Dracula, after that, for good measure. Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters is supposed to be the sequel which Mary Shelley never wrote (authors were a lot more original in her time than they are now, not given to writing only one novel and then riffing off that for endless sequels!). Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, the poet, and was a close friend of Lord Byron's, whose daughter Ada (commonly known as Ada Lovelace) played an important role, believe it or not, in the development of computers and even had a programming language named after her.
Victor Frankenstein (not von Frankenstein and certainly not Fronkensteen…!) is a fictional character, of course, who seems to have been born both in Napoli, in Italy, and in Geneva, in Switzerland! Who knows where he was really born?! He wasn't German, but he attended the University of Ingolstadt there. He links lightning to resurrection of tissue after witnessing lightning strike a tree (hey, he was insane, what can I say!). He creates the creature, which is entirely unlike most of the movie portrayals. The closest was Kenneth Branagh's 1994 movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
In the novel, the creature requests that Frankenstein make him a girlfriend. Seriously. It’s like that joke where one guy says, "My mother made me a homosexual" and his friend rejoins, "If I get the material, will she make me one?". The creature's offer is to disappear into the "wilderness" of South America and never trouble the House of Frankenstein again if Victor helps him find love, which is really all he's ever been after. So Victor repairs to the Orkneys to undertake this work. I don’t know why he goes there of all places, but therein is the link to this novel which is set in "Castle Frankenstein" in the Orkneys - and yes, that's Orkneys, not Orkney's! It’s a plural, not a possessive - although the Scots feel rightly possessive of all of them…!
Weyn wastes no time in bringing in the Gothic mystery elements by having one of the daughters apparently become possessed the first night that they spend in the dilapidated and drafty (or is it draughty?) castle, but this possession thing really goes nowhere and kinda fades away. It’s dismissed as bad dreams and sleep-walking. The family starts settling in and they hire some help. Ingrid becomes curious about the cottage close by the castle, deciding to visit its occupant, which seems rather out of character. Truth be told, both Ingrid and Giselle are quite the snobs (which is another way of spelling S.o.B.'s), but Giselle is the worst, taking upon herself the title of Baroness, and henceforth starting each of her diarrhea? entries with her snotty title! Ahem!
Weyn screws-up by having Giselle produce a match which she strikes against a rough patch on the tin in which it's contained. The problem is that this particular style of match wasn't in use in 1815. They were on the verge of being invented the following year, but it wasn't until 1826 and later that the matches with which we’re familiar came into general use. OTOH, the Frankensteins were inventive. Maybe they gave someone the idea?
Writers tend to forget that people are named after things and that you can imbue your characters with something (or offer a teasing clue to your reader) by picking the right name. In my own novel Saurus I have a lot of fun with character names! Sometimes a name is obvious: a dangerous girl might be Diana, a boy who seizes the reign could be Augustus, a thorny time-traveler might be Rose, a flighty boy wonder, Robin. The name Smith was once literally a blacksmith, Cooper a barrel-maker, Taylor a tailor(!), and so on. I myself come from a long line of trees so it’s hardly surprising I grew up on a street named Linden Grove! Lol! I do, therefore, find myself wondering where Shelley took the name 'Frankenstein'.
She can hardly have envisioned how famous that name would become when she initially penned her story, which was born of a weird dream she had in 1816 while staying in Geneva, Switzerland with Percy Shelly and Lord Byron. What a soirée that must have been. 'Frankenstein' means literally 'franc stone', but whether the franc derives from German (Frankish) or the French (the franc was their currency prior to the Euro) I don't know. It would seem that Shelley wasn't playing with names - although Victor seems to have been a reference to her lover, later husband, Percy Shelley. She actually wasn't Mary Shelly when she wrote her novel - she was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
We now rejoin our review in progress! At one point Weyn has Ingrid dress as a man so that her friend Anthony may sneak her into a medical lecture at the University of Edinburgh. This is bizarre behavior for the period, but acceptable in a novel like this. The real problem here was not that, but that Weyn depicts a lecturer exhibiting a dissected corpse. He squeezes the heart - and blood flows out of slits in the wrists. I call bullshit on that one. Does Weyn not understand that blood congeals, and rather quickly in a corpse? There is no way this could happen unless the doctor had killed the person immediately prior to his lecture! I think that anyone who tackles Frankenstein really needs to exhibit some knowledge of anatomy and physiology even if it's self-educated. To do less is to disrespect the source material. You may recall I mentioned her complete lack of research. Weyn failed epically here.
On the topic of disrespect, Weyn repeatedly disses the conventions and authenticity of the era of which she writes. She has Giselle, for example, foolishly meeting with gold-digger ex-boyfriend Johann alone. This is the man who spurned her rather cruelly just a month before, but now that he's learned of her fortune and title, he's written her a letter begging for a meeting in Edinburgh, and her uncle actually allows this to go ahead unchaperoned, which is pure nonsense. The two teens are in a very public place, and they kiss. They would have been asked to leave at best. Kissing in public in 1815?!
Giselle only belatedly suspects that Johann is after her title and fortune, but there is no rational explanation for her schizophrenia - at first sitting in adoration of him, and the next second feeling sheer repugnance. There is, of course, the 'possession' which she's exhibited, but this change of heart of hers doesn’t seem to be tied to her being possessed at all or if it is, it’s much more subtle than Weyn seems capable of penning. Johann's behavior is inexcusable and would have got him a public flogging at best (physically assaulting a baroness?!), but more to the point, if these girls actually conducted themselves in that era as they do in this novel, their behavior would be considered scandalous and shameful, and no one would have attended a ball held by such social pariahs.
On a side note, an hereditary barony passes to the eldest son, which, if it were Victor Frankenstein, would upon his death then devolve to his son. In Germany it was, I believe, possible for a daughter to inherit the title, but whether two daughters could inherit simultaneously, even though they were twins, is problematical. I suspect the oldest of the twins would inherit, not both of them. The big question here is whence the "Baron" title employed by the twins' uncle? He cannot also be a baron by inheritance, since Victor had the title. I suppose it could go to the uncle once Victor died without male issue, but then the twins couldn't use it! It’s also possible I guess, that their uncle earned his own title, but that's never made explicit. So, this isn't a huge story killer, but it is rather sloppy plotting, especially since all of Victor's family had been slain by the creature!
At one point, Weyn has Ingrid say, referring to a book on blood circulation written by William Harvey, "Is this from the sixteen hundreds"?!! That just screeched like chalk on a blackboard for me. I never lived then, obviously, so I can’t swear that particular phrase would never have been used, but it just screamed "wrong" to me. I felt she would have employed, instead, something like, "Is this seventeenth century?" or perhaps, "Is this an original?" Again, it's not a huge problem in itself, but one of an increasing number of such gaffs which, when they occur in sufficient volume, actually conspire to kill a novel.
Weyn seems not to understand that there was no indoor plumbing in 1815. When a hotel resident wanted a bath (assuming that one was even available), the maid would have to carry in the water (after heating it) and laboriously fill the tub by hand (and empty it of dirty water afterwards. Yuk!). There would certainly not have been a "bathroom" in a hotel room as Weyn stupidly claims, yet Weyn has Giselle immediately undress and drop into a tub in the bathroom right after arriving home from her 'contretemps' with Johann!
The real truth was that in Georgian times, nobody bathed - not in Britain, anyway. It’s not that it wasn't noticed (why do you think the women all carried fans?!), it’s just that no one seemed to have any idea what to do about it other than powder themselves down and carry dried flowers stuffed in their clothing. This novel is set in the time during which Jane Austen was alive, and if you visit her home you'll see that the best personal hygiene method which a respectable middle class woman like her had available was what you might literally describe as a water closet: a tiny closet which had a washbasin in it. This was how you took a bath - by wiping down your whole body a square inch at a time after filling the basin with water from a jug which had to be filled in turn from the well outside.
Ingrid hurries out the next day (dressed as a man!) to track down Johann, but she completely forgets her sister's fate in favor of joining some ruffians who are collecting bodies to sell for medical purposes! Again out with the window with the credibility. Why neither of these girls have the smarts to report the attack upon Giselle is a mystery, but once again Weyn shows her complete lack of research by talking of them going to the "police". There was no police force in Britain in 1815. The closest they came to it was the so-called "Bow Street Runners", but these were few in number and confined to London. The British Bobbie (named after the organizer, politician Robert Peel - and known as Peelers in Ireland) did not arrive until 1829 and later. This is another example of Weyn's inexcusable sloppiness in her writing. I don’t expect novels to be Tom-Clancy-True-To-Life. Novels like that are, in fact, tedious to read, but I do expect them to hold some semblance of reality enfolded within the fiction otherwise they become farcical.
Giselle has to be the most unintentionally ridiculous character ever created by an author. Weyn would have us believe, like any American teenager, that in the early nineteenth century, a girl of Giselle's background went to high-school and had "classmates"! But that's not even the most ridiculous thing about Giselle. No! Giselle is constantly under attack. Wherever she goes, some guy tries to rape her. We are led to believe that the 'reason' for this is her extreme beauty, but as I shall reveal, this is a lie!
It’s true that Scotsmen simply cannot keep their hands off her, don’t you know, but this simply begs the question as to how it is that Ingrid gets off Scot-free in this regard. No one even so much notices Ingrid, much less wants to rape her. How rejected she must feel! Yet she is Giselle's identical twin! Quite clearly the explanation for this phenomenon isn't that it's Giselle's goddess-like beauty which is the root cause of these assaults, but her name. Yes! To all true Scotsmen, Giselle is obviously a much more rape-worthy name than is Ingrid. I mean let’s face it, who wants to hear "I vill now Ingrid your ass, jungfräulich hottie"? Seriously. Any self-respecting girl would much prefer the sensually irresistible, "Why don’t you allow me to Giselle your porcelain buns, Miss Sweetbread?" Honestly - ask yourself which one you'd prefer...!
I don’t know what was going through Weyn's mind when she concocted this festering pile of garbage, but quite clearly whatever it was didn't amount to anything of worth or merit. I mentioned earlier that I saw no reason to make these two girls twins if they needed to be so different, and true to form, Weyn comes up with no reason whatsoever. It’s like she randomly decided they would be twins; then equally randomly decided that they needed to be as different as chalk and cheese (which actually, given the calcium content of both, isn't quite as stark as you might believe at first glance, but I digress!). Weyn would have made a great subject for young Frankstein's research on the brain. He would have labeled it Abby Normal.
On her trip to Edinburgh, Giselle is, of course, assaulted by Johann, who promptly disappears only to later turn-up dead. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. On her return trip home, Giselle's luggage breaks open at the dock, and Weyn would have us believe that not one single person, not even her identical twin, notices the poor girl hastily repacking her skivvies right there, out in the open, so that the boat sails without her and they don’t even notice her absence until they’re 'too far out' to come back for her? Seriously? Too far out is precisely the right phrase for this asinine drivel. What is Weyn, ten years old that she writes patent trash like this?
So Giselle has to take another boat which is, of course, captained by the villainous Ramsay, who of course promptly tries to rape her. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. Later, of course he's also found dead. On her way up to the castle from the dock immediately after the Ramsay ramming attempt, the guy who is hauling her luggage in his wagon also tries to rape her. Of course. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. Rape is quite obviously the new "Hi! How's it hanging?" in the Orkneys. And of course, the rapist de l'heure is promptly found dead.
Later, Giselle is attacked by some anonymous guy in a tunnel under the castle who turns out in the end to be the leering, lascivious, lecherous Riff, who routinely treats the girls like dog-shit and for the longest time, no one did anything about that, either, until, in the end, Riff is "fired". Yeah. He's not 'dismissed'. He's not 'let go'. His employment isn’t 'terminated'. He's "fired". That's not the only example of an Americanism in this story of Fräulein Fatals in Scotland. I think the only conclusion Weyn must be insisting that we draw from all of this is that quite clearly, in Weyn's world, all Scotsmen are rapists and body snatchers. So, of course, Giselle is arrested for murder. But not until they've had a party.
Yes, it’s not a ball, it’s a partay! Honestly? But fair's fair. I owe Weyn an apology. I had accused her of insufficient research and I was very wrong to do that. What I should have stated is that Weyn did the cube root of diddly squat research and was proud of it. She admits as much in her acknowledgments where she thanks her editor for pointing out the bloody obvious to her, but her editor quite clearly screwed-up equally badly since Weyn still has copious anachronisms in this cut-rate excuse for a fairy tale.
The partay is attended by pretty much everyone they invite, no matter who they are and never mind that they've neither met nor have any idea who these girls are, or what the invitees' personal commitments and private life entail. Nope, they simply drop everything and hie to the Orkneys to attend this partay. Three of the guests are Lord Byron, and "Mr and Mrs" Shelley - never mind that Mary and Percy weren't married at that time. Nor were they likely to be at a party in Scotland. Percy Shelley was in Europe in the summer of 1815. Byron was in England, but far too busy with his financial affairs and his new bride to go to a ball thrown by nobodies.
Mary (who wasn't a Shelley, but a Godwin at the time) gave birth to a premature daughter in late February of 1815 who died less than two weeks later. Mary was hardly likely to have been in much of a mood for partying a couple of months later, especially not when she was planning on eloping with Percy Shelley before so very long. Nevertheless, here they are, insists Weyn, and Ingrid gives them a guided tour of Victor's lab, so not only is Weyn slapping Shelley in the face by asserting that she didn’t have the wit to invent an original novel, merely ripping-off the Frankenstein family's true story, Weyn is also doing this in her own rip-off of the very novel Shelley penned! That's some chutzpah, isn’t it?
Eventually, there are so many disappearances and deaths on this tiny island that even the authorities notice it. An inspector from the "local constabulary" - who has an American accent(!) shows up to investigate. Which part of 'There was no friggin' constabulary' is it that Weyn doesn’t get? Weyn makes it sound like this tiny island, with a population of maybe five families, is positively swarming with constables, yet despite all this extensive policing, all the men routinely feel free to assault women and attempt to rape them whenever the urge, er, arises. But that's not the funniest thing about this particular scene. When the inspector calls at the castle, it’s been five days since Ramsay's assault on Giselle, yet the inspector, obviously completely on top of his game, asserts that Ramsay has been missing for two weeks! Moron.
And what of Ingrid's dalliance with Captain Wally, the island's most eminent non-entity? Well, he's had a leg amputated, leaving a bloody, bandaged stump below the knee, yet within a few days of his surgery, he's romping off riding and sailing. But it’s no biggie, because: Ingrid to the rescue! Despite having zero medical training, much less any actual practical medical experience, 17-year-old Ingrid purloins festering body parts from the decomposing Riff to replace Wally's missing leg, his hand, and part of his face. And the operation is a resounding success.
The only reason I finished this novel was its massive hilarity content as Weyn repeatedly outdid herself in piling the highly unlikely on top of the absurdly improbable, and shoring the whole thing up with the abso-bloody-lutely impossible. This novel is without a doubt the worst I have ever read, but it’s also simultaneously the most unintentionally amusing, so if I were to offer any recommendation it would be for the laughs this humongous pile of rabid baboon droppings delivers. But in terms of worth, this novel is so warty that even its warts have big, fat stinking, purulent, green pus-oozing warts.
