Our Hideous Progeny

Our Hideous Progeny is a terrific retelling of Frankenstein. Mary, the great-niece.of Victor Frankenstein, is a woman in a man's world, finding sexism at every level of academia. Everything changes when she finds an old notebook and begins experimenting. The story is very well written and the gothic atmosphere is excellent.

A conversation I had with Matt immediately upon finishing this last night:

A: This was a Frankenstein retelling.

M: Did she create a monster? (I'm assuming it's a “she.”)

A: It is a she, and yes, she did create a monster. Actually, Mary and her husband and this crappy dude were paleontologists and were trying to re-create a prehistoric dinosaur even though they didn't entirely know what it was supposed to look like since they had incomplete fossil records.

M: Did they learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?!

A: Well considering this was set in the 1850s, it would be another 150 years before Jurassic Park would come out.

M: Michael Crichton could have warned them! They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't think whether they should!

—–

I had a lot of fun reading this. Was Mary kind of written out of her time frame? Probably. Girl was a pretty radical feminist, and wanted a divorce from her lousy gambling husband in A Time When That Didn't Happen, and also might have been a lesbian, or at the very least bisexual. Did we all see it coming from a mile away that nothing good comes of trying to bring living things back from the dead and there was no way this was going to bring Acclaim on Both Their Houses? Obviously. Did I adore the Creature like Mary did? No, but I could see why she loved it so, as history repeated itself (the original Victor Frankenstein was her great-uncle in this iteration). So ultimately, this was a book I wouldn't have picked up if not for book club, and I ended up being really invested in it.

TW: many internal conversations about the loss of a baby (unclear whether it was a late neonatal loss or a loss just after birth), grief, sexism, racism, a bit of gore related to the assembling of the Creature