This wasn't bad, but unfortunately the concept was better than the actual book.

 

We're not really looking at a completely normal "Frankenstein" story, here, as should be evident from the synopsis of the book. This isn't a pieced together monster, this is a dead guy.

 

Also, the main character, Tor, is insane.

 

Mad scientists are kind of a trope that I admit to not being particularly fond of. Tor fits it to a tee, even better, perhaps, than Victor Frankenstein himself. She has absolutely no qualms about lying, torturing, and pretty much destroying lives. She's also extremely careless, which causes a large chunk of the problems in the book.

 

I don't generally fall into the camp of "you must like the main character to like a book," but I just don't quite care enough about Tor to have much interest in following her. She's unscrupulous without it being interesting, unscrupulous in a fussy way that keeps her so detached from her work and the reader that it is hard to get invested in what is going on at any point. Add to it that Tor herself causes pretty much all of the problems that need to be solved because she has some kind of God complex and also makes a crop of mistakes, and we've got a really awkward set-up as our driving force of the novel.

 

Owen is a much better friend than Tor deserves, and I regret that he wasn't the main character.

 

I was hoping to enjoy this more than I did, but this felt like Frankenstein with all of the moral questioning and actual feeling ripped out, and unfortunately that was what I enjoyed about the original.

 

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.