I received a copy from Grand Central Publishing through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Mary Bennet has always been different from her sisters. Considered the ugly sister by society and the odd one by just about everyone, she’s never fit in. As a scientist, what other people think mostly doesn’t matter as long as she is able to find ways to learn about and practice it. Everything changes when Mary finds a friend in Septimus Pike after striking a business deal with him. When her hard work becomes extremely fruitful, Mary discovers that Pike isn’t what she believed him to be, and he discovers that she can raise the dead.
This is among the most interesting Pride and Prejudice retellings I’ve read because it’s also a Frankenstein retelling! Told through a series of letters, and later diary entries, we follow the ultimate middle child: Mary Bennet. The story truly brings the forgotten sister to the forefront and we get to watch her fight her way to get around what society will allow a woman to do. During her journey, we also see her figure out how to bring the recently deceased back to life and how that quickly goes south.
You have no idea how excited I was to read this book! It was almost everything I’d hope it would be. I was completely absorbed in the story until the very end, which is when it started to fizzle out. My only real complaint is that Mary’s early letters sound more like they came from her memoir, and the rest of her letters were really just diary entries before they actually became her diary entries later on. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story.