Product Description

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Product Details

• Published on: 1993-10-01
• Released on: 1993-10-01
• Format: Kindle eBook
• Number of items: 1

Amazon.com Review
Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up-Full-color drawings, photographs, and reproductions with extended captions have been added to the unedited text of Shelley's novel, thus placing the work in the context of the era in which it was written. The artwork faithfully represents the text and makes this edition appealing to reluctant readers. Unfortunately, many of the captions provide tangential information that, although interesting, interrupts the flow of the story. However, readers will quickly learn that it is not necessary to read every caption and appreciate this volume for its many quality illustrations.
Michele Snyder, Chappaqua Public Library, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 8^-12. Part of the Whole Story series, this is the full text of Mary Shelley's classic gothic story, which was first published in 1818 and has been a wild success ever since. Philippe Munch's illustrations have none of the power of Barry Moser's unforgettable woodcuts that evoke the loneliness of the grotesque outsider (in the Pennyroyal edition published by the University of California Press in 1984). The design here is crowded, and the type is small. However, the many period prints and maps in color and in black and white, with long, detailed captions, do provide the historical setting for the story, its geography, customs, and ideas. Teens enthralled by pop versions of the myth as well as science fiction fans will be interested in going back to the full version of what has been called the first science fiction novel and learning about the circumstances under which it was written by a woman, just 18 years old, 170 years ago. Hazel Rochman