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From the bestselling Australian author of The Hating Game, now a major motion picture, comes something a little unexpected… an historical rom-com that imagines Victor Frankenstein’s sheltered younger sister’s attempts to create the perfect man. A great twist on the well known tale where we now have a female protagonist as the creator. She lives in the shadow of her brother because of the time, but we see the true genius she is next to the juxtaposition of her very feminine want for live and protection. The relationships with her brother, sister in law, monster and suitor all show different parts of Angelika’s personality. Everything she does and wants is done in abundance. This is a great story to slip away into a world of fantasy and forgiveness for just a little while… Tina, QLD, 4 Stars I’m giving this one 2.5 stars, it had such great potential for a great spooky read but just fell flat and was full of unexpected religious messaging and overtones. This book takes two hard selling tropes: instalove (the MOST insta of insta loves,) and love triangle, and shifts it into this completely bizarre, quirky, romance book that somehow…works? I think??
There was some Real Weird stuff going on in this book with the Frankenstein's being atheists & Victor being all about science and Angelika being """selfish"""" and """"vain"""" and """"uncaring"""" until Will/Father Arlo pops in and teaches them about religion and ~miracles and being nice to poor people or some shit. I don't know, honestly. It felt gross for Angelika to be as old as she was and needing to be ~taught better behavior by a man, and a priest at that. Homegirl was honestly fine as she was. And her being like "you can't TELL me what to believe or not believe anymore, brother [because i ~believe now]!!!" was a bit of a side-eye. She just felt like such a passive character. She doesn't do things, things just happen & everyone is mean to her because she likes to buy expensive soap instead of working at a soup kitchen. She spends basically the entire book mooning around about Will/Father Arlo and wanting to have a baby. It's a bit regressive, is all I'm saying. There is a line towards the end, direct quote: "You are in the bed of a spoiled, wealthy heiress who has realized her privileged position and will work for the rest of her life to deserve you." Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike, nah brah, this is not it. Now, Sally's second book, 99 Percent Mine, is one of my all time favorites. I've reread it a million times, and when I started this book, I felt echoes of Tom Valeska and Darcy Barrett in Will and Angelika (crazy devotion and longing, insane sexual tension, etc.). And that was fantastic, as only Sally can make it. The characters weren't afraid to show how in love they were all the time, especially Angelika – except, of course, they couldn't be together. Although I enjoy romances in which both characters subtly help each other grow as people, I would normally loathe a romance in which a man is constantly urging a woman to be different. However, Angelika is such a brat at the start of the book, and Will is so gentle in his efforts to help Angelika be a better person, that I didn’t mind the dynamic between them at all.
Except there are things near the end I did not love, and won't mention due to spoilers, but are tied up in both what the Frankenstein's believe to be part of their foundation and, as it turns out, Will's, and how that all comes together.. I don't know, felt a little strange. But then again the whole book is strange. I'll also admit that Will was occasionally a struggle when it came to his behaviour towards Angelika and not always in the way he should've been. It's hard to explain but him being hot and cold was fine, I just thought there were some inconsistencies mixed in, too. hello?!?!?!? earth to hating game sally?!?!??!?!?!??!?! if you're being held prisoner blink three times please we can help The first 40% of the book I really, really enjoyed. Was it absurd? Absolutely but it was also quite fun and funny. However, at about the 50% mark the book becomes overrun with religious overtones, even making the love interest a Priest. While the Frankenstein’s make clear in the first half of the book they believe in science and fact by the end they are praying and with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being highly regarded as a critique of religion this felt like a really weird choice and I didn’t really like it, at all. Especially contrasting the ending of this novel with the original Frankenstein. This is obviously a re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only in this version Victor is resurrecting dead bodies to find a husband and partner for his sister Angelika. Obviously, resurrecting someone for your personal gain is all kinds of morally wrong but this is a Frankenstein retelling so I digress.
When her handsome scientific miracle sits up on the lab table, her hopes for an instant romantic connection are thrown into disarray. Her resurrected beau (named Will for the moment) has total amnesia and is solely focused on uncovering his true identity. Trying to ignore their heart-pounding chemistry, Angelika reluctantly joins the investigation into his past, hoping it will bring them closer. But when a second suitor emerges to aid their quest, Angelika wonders if she was too hasty inventing a solution. Perhaps fate is not something that can be influenced in a laboratory? Or is Will (or whatever his name is!) her dream man, tailored for her in every way? And can he survive what was done to him in the name of science, and love? I'm definitely glad I gave it a chance because I do think Thorne has shown she can do more than just contemporary, and she can be weird, poke around into different spaces, and that's all good. This either works for you or it doesn't or, like me, you're somewhere in the middle. But this is not remotely the nail in the coffin that I expected it to be (everything post-THE HATING GAME has been unpredictable) and I look forward to seeing what she does, and where she goes, next.From USA Today bestselling author of The Hating Game Sally Thorne comes something a little unexpected... a historical rom-com that imagines Victor Frankenstein's sheltered younger sister, and her attempts to create the perfect man. A love story with intrigue, mystery and humour. I fell in love with Angelika Frankenstein from the beginning and her quest for love. The connections between all the characters draws you into their world. Lose yourself in this contemporary romantic story. Penny, QLD, 5 Stars I love Sally Thorne. LOVE her. She's written actual masterpieces. I will fight to the death for her. Of the two, Angelika has more internal character development, and this is a relief since at the beginning of the book she is very spoiled, utterly unaware of her privilege, and careless with the lives of those around her, not to mention the bodies of the dead. Angelika is also terribly frustrated and bored, trapped at home with no intellectual stimulation or company her age while her brother travels the world. She’s unable to find her own husband or run her own household without her brother’s assistance. It was easy to both feel frustration on her behalf at the limits imposed upon her by society, and to feel irritation at her unquestioning attitude of entitlement. From an entertainment standard, I’ll give this book five stars. It’s definitely the only book in a LONG TIME that has held me captive and I’ve been giddy to get to at the end of the day.
Mild spoilers, of course. More significant ones later, but I’ll flag them up so you can exit the vehicle if you need to. Two talented chess players challenge each other on and off the board in bestselling author Hazelwood’s YA debut. I’m sure that at some time we would like to change the appearance of someone we love, but not completely make a new person. This book is a love story with a difference. Set in the 1800s scientific experiments go a bit wrong. Easy to read and enjoyable because of its difference. Vivien, ACT, 4 Stars So…I mean. I guess let me just start this by saying that I have always been very in love with The Hating Game and I have nothing but admiration for authors who are willing to take risks. And I’m aware it feels like a loaded compliment to describe a book as “risk” but there’s an extravagantly weirdness about Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match that may not pay off for all readers. And, to be honest, did not wholly pay off for this one, even though something I love about Sally Thorne as a writer is her willingness to embrace the weird. I mean, the fact Lucy and Joshua are, in their own ways, deeply weird people is why The Hating Game speaks to me as deeply and particularly as it does. I just also say at this juncture that I have no issues with heroines (or characters in general) in romance who do bad things or need to learn how to be a less dreadful person. I am HERE for that stuff so hard. I don’t want it to come across that I am excessively condemning Angelika for doing the very thing that men have been doing in fiction literally since before Jesus. But Angelika is a romance heroine, not a horror villain, and I wish I’d had a better sense that both her, and the book as a whole, understood that re-shaping someone, then forcing them to live as your dependent in mental and physical torment (Will is explicitly in pain the whole book and his recovery of self-agency is represented largely by gardening) isn’t all that cute, no matter how disenfranchised or unloved you feel. I mean, at that point, you’re basically Warren from Buffy, no matter what your gender identity.
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This book is SO camp and a good chunk of it is really fun (and absurdly over the top). It’s a mix of Frankenstein and the campiest historical romance you’ve ever read. From a *romance* standard………idk. Is it super steamy and swoony? Do I feel the moment these characters fall in love? Do I see the connection and know these two are destined to be together because of ABC? Ummmmm…not really. He paused, wincing, trying to choose his words. “I am very proud of you, for starting to think this way, and I shall do the same. I think we lost our parents before we could learn the importance of economy.” “And charity. And community.
Listen, real talk: Did Sally Thorne find religion after she published The Hating Game and that's why she writes such boring books now? Like, DM me & let me know, it's fine, I won't tell anyone. Because honestly, it's the only reasonable explanation I can think of as to why the steam level is basically nonexistent & there are weird religious overtones in all her novels now. In that (dreadful, lbr) last one, the MC was the daughter of a priest or whatever, right? And then, in this one, the hero is literally a priest? Like, it's a bit sus if we are being honest. Not super keen on that at all. Similarly, there are moments when he steps up to defend her or shows a deep empathy for her loneliness, but they never felt earned because I never understood how he got to them, given the foundation of their relationship. Or maybe I’m just a really unforgiving person and that’s something you should all bear in mind if you ever decide to blend me like a Spotify playlist and then animate my corpse to be your sextoy. Angelika, meanwhile, is horny for Will from the outset but I never quite got what she saw in him beyond the physical, because his main personality traits were “amnesiac” and “gardening.” There’s a bit of a mysterryyyy hereeee and I was really curious as to who?! our cadaver really was!!! Angelika Frankenstein wants a husband but she’s a Frankenstein so she’s a little weird, socially awkward, and sends men running with her sharp questions. So what’s a girl of twenty six (not six and twenty?! What kind of HR is this????) to do except make her own husband from some cadavers?! But when a second suitor emerges to aid their quest, Angelika wonders if she was too hasty inventing a solution. Perhaps fate is not something that can be influenced in a laboratory? Or is Will (or whatever his name is!) her dream man, tailored for her in every way? And can he survive what was done to him in the name of science, and love?
Sally Thorne
The mystery of who Will was had me guessing until the end and I loved the pace at which it was unraveled. There was a minor love triangle, but I actually really liked how that wrapped up as well! I also loved the ode to Shelley’s Frankenstein at the end. All that to say! Well, nothing really. You'll either read this book, or you've already read it, or you won't. When her handsome scientific miracle sits up on the lab table, her hopes for an instant romantic connection are thrown into disarray. Her resurrected beau (named Will for the moment) has total amnesia and is solely focused on uncovering his true identity. Trying to ignore their heart-pounding chemistry, Angelika reluctantly joins the investigation into his past, hoping it will bring them closer. When the handsome scientific miracle sits up on the lab table, her hopes for an instant romantic connection are thrown into disarray. Named Will for the moment, he has amnesia and is solely focused on uncovering his true identity. Trying to ignore their heart-pounding chemistry, Angelika reluctantly joins his investigation, hoping it will bring them closer. But then a second suitor emerges to aid their quest. Perhaps fate is not something that can be influenced in a laboratory? Or is Will (or whatever his name is!) her dream man, tailored for her in every way? This book was entertaining and enjoyable. The author, Sally Thorne, engaged readers in an incredible book. Thorne has a great way with words and that shone through her writing. This book was a wonderful, heart-warming story that incorporated the right amounts of humour and passion. This feel-good book’ mystery had me holding my breath. I relished the book as Angelika Frankenstein unravels her life story. I adored every part of this book and can’t wait to read more Sally Thorne books! Nishka, NSW, 4 Stars
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