Book Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

This will be my first book review that I'm writing as part of my new 'Book Lists' page on this blog. As this is my first book review blog, I thought I'd quickly say a little bit about what I intend to include and what people can expect from these types of book blogs.
These book review's will be the same as all of my other blogs with regards to me telling things as they are. I want to give my honest opinions on the books that I've read and have the opportunity to say whether I liked them, what things I found hard to understand, etc... As well as giving my opinions on the books I will also give them a rating out of ten (with ten being the best and one being the worst). I will also endeavour to say whether I feel people should read it and more specifically what type of book readers would enjoy reading it.

This may not be the definitive way I set these blogs out in future, I'm sure that over the next few reviews I'll end up tweaking a few things, but the majority of this content will hopefully stay as it is.

The subject of Frankenstein (or Frankenstein's monster), similar to things like vampires, is one that most people tend to have a general knowledge about, without having read the original book. Its for this reason that I wanted to read Mary Shelley's original story, and see how it compares to all the different variations I've seen and read about over the years.

Having now finished the book, I can say that it was not how I'd imagined it to be. Going into reading this book, I thought that a lot of the book would be focused on the events leading up to and during the creation of the monster, but instead focused more on the events following the monsters creation.

By focusing more on the events following the monsters creation meant that there was time enough to develop the relationship between Victor and the Monster and also gave way to more interesting plot twists. By introducing the monster more early on allowed multiple views in which the story could be told. This aspect in my opinion added greatly to the book allowing you to gain the monsters perspective as well as Victors.

The downside to this book for me, and it was only a small downside, was that later in the book in-between all the interesting, action/adventure scenes it did feel as though it dragged on a bit, and you had to stick with it for a little bit until things picked up again. This only happened on a few occasions, but I did have to make a bit more effort to keep with things.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and discovered loads of new things about Frankenstein's life that I hadn't known before. Out of ten I'd rate this book a 7, a good classic book, for a wide number of audiences, especially anyone interested in monster and mystery stories.

Hopefully this was a decent review of the book. Even though I do want to try and portray as clear a description of the book as possible, I don't want to give away anything, or reveal any spoilers. That'll be my main priority whilst writing these reviews, as I don't want to ruin these books for anyone.

Having finished Frankenstein, I've now moved on and begun to read The Hunger Games series, in an attempt to finish them all before I see the film, which is released next week. Let's hope I manage it.
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