LEE, Jen

In an alternate-universe steampunk 1818 Geneva, Alasdair Finch lives with a terrible secret. He’s responsible for the accident that killed his brother Oliver, but he’s also responsible for having furtively dug up his brother’s body and re-animated him entirely with clockwork parts. Now, two years later, Alasdair keeps his monstrous brother hidden, both to muffle Oliver’s violent rages and to protect him from the townspeople’s narrow-minded vigilantism. Then an arrest warrant is issued for Alasdair for the crime of helping “mechanicals,” and he must quickly flee Geneva for Ingolstadt, where he discovers that his mentor Dr. Geisler is secretly and illegally performing the same sorts of resurrections that Alasdair is horrified at having accomplished. This retelling of Frankenstein, set in the year the novel came out, has all the gothic atmosphere of Shelley’s book, and includes Mary Godwin (Shelley’s maiden name) as a character. Here she is inspired to write that novel as a means of grappling with her own abhorrence at having assisted in Oliver’s reawakening, but her fictionalized account further inflames prejudices against mechanicals. Lee elaborates on Shelley’s themes of humanity and playing God—concerns as timely now as in Shelley’s era