I am so glad that I listened to this on audio through Audrey with a step-by-step guide. I think it completely transformed my experience of the book and the language. All of the reviews I’ve read and Chelsey and Sarah’s reflections on the Novel Pairings Podcast emphasized the challenging, dense language and the excessive extemporizing on landscapes, but I honestly didn’t really notice it. My one criticism of the audio narration is the strange accent that the narrator assumed in certain moments for Victor. 

I didn’t know much about Frankenstein prior to reading this, so I was really surprised by the epistolary structure and so impressed by the parallelism of emotional distress and duress as the novel progressed and the characters interacted and developed. I loved The Being’s perspective halfway through, especially the exploration of the acquisition of language and reading, and I loved that it felt the novel then flipped its structure for the second half of the book. Victor and The Being shared similar sentiments about desire for communion, grief, despair, and revenge. 

This was brilliantly written and it made me excited to teach this book one day. Reflecting on the comments about the language used in the book makes me feel even more committed to mostly reading the book aloud in the classroom, but that doesn’t dim my enthusiasm at all.