The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein
This is a retelling of Mary Shelley's famous “Frankenstein”, that was… interesting, I guess? Certainly not one to forget.
My impressions on this book were neither good, nor bad. Admittedly, I have never read the original Frankenstein, so I can’t make a comparative analysis about who did it better, but I can tell you what I thought about The Dark Descent. It started off really strong, with the kind of characters I was both intrigued about and sympathized with. Elizabeth had the kind of selfish determination that I found riveting – she was someone who knew what she wanted, fixed an eye on her goal, and plowed her way to it, no hesitations, no deviations. She was the driving force of the book, I thought so – and then it turned out that she was completely submissive to Victor. Victor Frankenstein was – hmm, at the risk of repeating myself, intriguing. His mind worked in ways that I found incredible. Thanks to these two, the book started off well, but later there was this influx of side characters who I found a bit irritating (Elizabeth grows a conscience, too and Victor goes off his rockers. Ehh.) The story starts breaking apart then.
While the protagonist and the antagonist are both good, the rest was okay at best. The side-characters fell flat, and the story devolved into cliché at the end.(Spoilers ahead….
Particularly that bit with Elizabeth’s stint in the nuthouse. That trope is already overused; although, I may not be able to blame Kiersten White for that, if what she did was stick close to the source material – like I said, I haven’t read Frankenstein yet, so have no way to tell
...End spoiler)
One other thing was that considering that The Dark Descent is set in 18th century Europe or something, the women are given a suspicious amount of freedom to travel. Not a glaring issue, but it was something I noted. The rest of the main plotline quite follows the original Frankenstein, so no surprises here.
So overall, I found this book neither good nor bad. It started out strong, but didn’t continue in that vein to the end. There’s a lot of introspection from Elizabeth’s side. Cliches stand out, but nothing too irritating. If I were to rate the book, I would say, the higher side of good, but not excellent. A good, diverting read – if you are a fan of Mary Shelley’s original work, go for it!
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