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Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein
by Lita Judge
Pairing free verse with over three hundred pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations, Mary's Monster is a unique and stunning biography of Mary Shelley, the pregnant teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time.
Legend is correct that Mary Shelley began penning Frankenstein in answer to a dare to write a ghost story. What most people don't know, however, is that the seeds of her novel had been planted long before that night. By age nineteen, she had been disowned by her family, was living in scandal with a married man, and had lost her baby daughter just days after her birth. Mary poured her grief, pain, and passion into the powerful book still revered two hundred years later, and in Mary's Monster, author/illustrator Lita Judge has poured her own passion into a gorgeous book that pays tribute to the life of this incredible author.
"Readers will be enthralled by the dark and exacting verse, beautifully accompanied by haunting black-and-white watercolor spreads... A must-purchase." ―School Library Journal (starred review)
"[T]his is a stirring, impeccably researched portrait of a remarkable woman and her literary 'progeny.' Much like Mary, Judge forges a Creature all her own." ―Booklist
"Darkly evocative ... Students of literature will appreciate the powerful poetry that brings life to Mary Shelley's story the way that Shelley herself breathed life into her novel of a scientist who animates a corpse." ―Kirkus Reviews
This information about Mary's Monster was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lita Judge is the author and illustrator of several award-winning picture books for young readers, including How Big Were Dinosaurs?, Bird Talk, Born in the Wild, Flight School, and Red Sled. After a summer spent reading the handwritten journals of Mary Shelley, Lita embarked on a five year journey to tell the story of this courageous teenager in Mary's Monster. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, with her husband, two cats and a parrot.
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by Kim Fu
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