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Shelley, Percy Bysshe
3 Reviews
(3)
4-6
Servant Felix tells of how, in 1816 Switzerland, his employer Lord Byron's night of revelrous storytelling with friends (including Percy and Mary Shelley) is interrupted by Lizzie, a blind and scarred girl seeking her sister. Horror unfolds as Lizzie recounts her experience with loss, lightning, and an unprincipled woman scientist. Literary-minded readers will recognize Lizzie's haunting story as the germ of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Reviewer: Megan Lynn Isaac
(3)
YA
Poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley (here a girl named Shelly) are re-imagined as modern teenagers in Roth's impassioned tribute to Romanticism. Shy outsider John Keats recounts events leading to Shelly's suicide, as he and handsome, self-obsessed Gordon Byron fulfill her final wishes. High school is just a backdrop to the writers' central preoccupations with sex, death, love, and escaping their tragically dysfunctional families.
Reviewer: Lauren Adams
(3)
YA
Sixteen-year-old Mary elopes with an older (and married) poet, forsaking her family to bear his child. But her passionate life of ideals is undercut with a darkness that erupts in scandal, heartbreak, and the nightmarish imaginings that will become Frankenstein. Rather than developing its historical underpinnings, this dramatic reinvention of Mary Shelley's life explores the Romantic concepts of love and creation.
Reviewer: Claire E. Gross
3 reviews
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