Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match: A Novel

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It gave me Bridgerton meets The Addams Family vibes - a little bit spooky, a little sweet, with a wonderful, loving cast of friends and a creative, heartwarming romance that kept me on edge right up until the very end. I shouldn’t have read this and now I truly need to just remember how much I love The Hating Game and ignore all that comes after. Yes, the gothic mansion was interesting, but you don't really get a dark or foreboding feeling from it. And she’s so desperate, like she knows nothing about this guy other than she really liked his face – nothing about his past, his history. Take everything you've come to love in a Sally Thorne novel: witty banter, a sexy, toe-curling romance, and voice that pirouettes off the page, but add one part Tim Burton.

It is her debut novel that has sold in over twenty-five countries and is being made into a major motion picture, directed by Peter Hutchings and starring Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell. Despite her beauty and wealth, Angelika’s intelligence and independence have alienated her every suitor, so she and her brother have hit on the solution of making her one. I'm definitely glad I gave it a chance because I do think Thorne has shown she can do more than just contemporary, and she can be weird, poke around into different spaces, and that's all good.

It felt gross for Angelika to be as old as she was and needing to be ~taught better behavior by a man, and a priest at that. for reasons unclear to me he is the most placid human alive and is fine with this, so long as they figure out who he was before he died, which they work together to do.

Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like.

Don't get me wrong, Angelika came a LONG way, but I still never felt what I should have for her character. Maybe Angelika wouldn’t be a hot garbage person later on the book, but all I saw was “love triangle” and I noped the fuck out. I've reread it a million times, and when I started this book, I felt echoes of Tom Valeska and Darcy Barrett in Will and Angelika (crazy devotion and longing, insane sexual tension, etc. a historical rom-com that imagines Victor Frankenstein's sheltered younger sister, and her attempts to create the perfect man. When assisting in her brother Victor's ground-breaking experiment to bring a reassembled man back to life, she realizes that having an agreeable gentleman convalescing in the guest suite might be a chance to let a man get to know the real her.

this was pitched as the tim burtonification of historical romance; angelika is the sister/bombshell assistant of viktor frankenstein, and she has decided that together they will build her ideal match using various corpses from a morgue as everyone in town has rejected her for being too Intelligent and Opinionated and Forthright and she is old (24) and unwed. Obviously, resurrecting someone for your personal gain is all kinds of morally wrong but this is a Frankenstein retelling so I digress. However, I think you do have to let this book just be what it is and not think too hard about the weird bits that don't quite work.

I didn't need to read page after page of Angelika being like, "Well, I can't deny this guy is handsome and could give me everything I want and also that I really like him. Another big issue I had was that this was supposed to be a historical book, and these characters came off as completely modern, progressive people who were transplanted in the past just for atmosphere's sake.