The Likeness (Tana French) + Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

I just finished two books within days of each other so they both go in one blog. Okay. The first I want to talk about is The Likeness, because I liked it more than I liked Frankenstein.

The Likeness is sort of a sequel to another book I read this summer, In the Woods, but not really. Though Operation Vestal from In the Woods is mentioned a half dozen times, this book can easily stand alone. It is about Cassie Maddox, a main character from French's debut novel, and a girl who looks just like her who has been murdered. She then returns back to her undercover days and lives this young woman's life, living with her roommates and trying to help solve the case from the inside. The first 400 or so pages are a steady and mounting toward the climax. The last 66 page are a intense, with everything falling into place for a dramatic ending. The entire book kept me captivated with French's mesmerizing writing style and delicate details. Everything is, somehow, inexorably linked together and you don't realize it until you've turned the last page.

Frankenstein was a little bit of a different story (in more ways that one). Published in the early 1800s, the book differs from the novels I'd been consuming all summer. But as a first group book for AP Literature, it was a good pick - not too long and not too boring. But I'd expected more action and less... illness. The book breezes past any scientific logic, which I can't blame Shelley for - I wouldn't know how to make life from inanimate matter either. And the good-vs-evil argument of the book, presented in an unorthodox way, kept me interested. Who is the monster: Frankenstein, for creating and abandoning the creature, or the creature for what it's done? However, one thing bothered me a lot about this book and that was its realistic inaccuracies. Even as an early science fiction novel, there was no excuse for the constant sickness of Victor Frankenstein. He gets ill after seeing his creation come to life, after seeing the corpse of a friend and on several other occassions - only one of them being truly viable. The constant whining and sickness made Frankenstein seem like a sissy and made the book a little more than a bit laborious to read. I expected something more dramatic and engaging that what I got from Frankenstein, but I will let it reside on my bookshelf all the same.