Category: Reviews by Sharelle Moranville

In the two hundred years since its publication, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein has permeated our culture. The story has been adapted for plays and films; published in many different book editions with various prefaces, introductions, end notes, illustrations, and supplemental materials. Frankenstein shows up in cartoons. Little monsters ring our doorbells at Halloween.

Yet, despite the ubiquity of the story, few of us had read it. It is a very old book which tests our patience with19^th century literary conventions. It has a quaint Russian doll structure with the exotic Arabian’s story tucked inside the monster’s story, absorbed into Victor Frankenstein’s story, transcribed by the sea captain in a years-long series of letters to his sister in England. We chafed at that, and the long family lineages, paeans to nature, and over-shared emotional states. And particularly, we disliked the whining of Victor Frankenstein. Nonetheless, we persisted with our usual lively discussions.

To summarize the story: Privileged, young Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy (aka science), decides to stitch together scavenged body parts and bring them to life. And one dark and stormy night, he does. But when his creation turns out to be big and ugly and scary, Victor flees in horror, abandoning his newborn.

One of the most interesting parts of the story for several of us was the middle where the creature grows up, as it were, becoming aware of his senses, learning how to find nourishment and moving through the world, discerning right from wrong. By his intimate observation of neighbors he watches from his hovel, he learns about family. During his time of watching and secretly helping them with their chores, he hears the tale of the beautiful Arabian woman, and he learns about romantic love. When he needs a broader understanding of Western history and the circumstances of his own origins, he happens upon books and letters in satchels and pockets. He is kind and intuitive. And very, very lonely.

Plan A to solve his loneliness is to become so kind and cultured he will be warmly welcomed in society despite his physical grotesqueness. But those hopes are dashed when he gets beaten and chased away by the people in the cottage he has been secretly observing and looks on as his friends.

Plan B is to obtain a mate like himself that they may live in isolation together. Knowing, by this time, how he came to be and who gave him life, he finds Victor Frankenstein and makes his request. Frankenstein waffles, saying no, then yes, then no again. The creature becomes so angry and frustrated, he lashes out and begins to murder people dear to Victor.

By the end, Frankenstein, having searched the Alps for his creation that he may kill it, dies after telling the whole misadventure, from beginning to the end, to a ship’s captain, Robert Walton, who is aspiring to reach the North Pole. Shortly after Victor dies, the creature finds his creator’s body on the ship and asks forgiveness for killing people whom Frankenstein loved, but still he presses his case: (addressing the captain)

You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and friendship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be considered the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me . . . Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

After his rant, he announces his intention to go into the icy climes and build his own funeral pyre.

I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames . . . My spirit will sleep in peace; or, if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

And he leaps out the cabin window onto an ice raft and drifts into darkness.

Mary Shelley gives her creature an anti-heroic/Miltonic/Shakespearian grand exit, but she lets Victor Frankenstein just fade away. So where do the author’s sympathies lie? Who is the monster? What are the responsibilities of creation? What happens when we’re not loved? What are the perils of loving? Of loneliness? Why do we seem cursed to judge by appearances?

During our final week of discussing Frankenstein, we had the perk of hosting a local author who has done primary-source research on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. We came to understand more fully the abandonment issues which Mary, left motherless after only a few days, likely felt. She spent her young years living in acrimony with her stepmother until she was banished to Scotland by her father, so she likely had more than one critical feeling about the familial creator who abandoned his inherently good and hopeful child. Yet according to her diaries, she thrived with the Baxter family in Scotland, riding, reading, and soaking up lots of scary Scottish lore. There she met Percy Shelley and began an affair with him. While traveling with him and a friend in Switzerland, during a confining day of bad weather, they each committed to write a story founded on some supernatural occurrence. As she brags in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she was the only one to complete the challenge.

And thus the science fiction genre was born.

We spent four weeks on this slender volume, finding much to learn and discuss: the differences between the original 1818 edition and the revised 1831 edition, the literary conventions of 19^th century novels, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous but absent feminist mother, the abandonment by her father, the grief from the loss of three children, the perpetual drama of a vagabond life with Percy Shelley and her dedication to transcribing his poetry after his death. Plus, the specter of genteel poverty always hovering while she raised her only surviving child, a son, and wrote six more novels. All this in a time when women were vulnerable in so many ways.

A life bravely lived life, Mary Shelley. R.I.P.

— Sharelle Moranville

Reading British author Graham Swift’s short stories in Twelve Post-War Tales is a little like eating a small bowl of dulce de leche ice cream. Each bite is rich and complex, leaving an intriguing after-taste, calling us to read and re-read. To savor each story.

A paradox of literary fiction is that its extreme specificity is what allows it to feel universal. I, for instance, have nothing in common with seventy-year-old Dermot, a Cork man from York, who banters in a pub with his mates on a rainy night about a sweet girl he once knew who worked in chocolate. Innuendo, wink-wink, laughter. But who among us can read the closing passage of the story “Chocolate,” without sighing Ah yes. I have felt that way. Surely everyone has felt that way. Thank God we can feel that way.

Everything had an inky sheen. On the strip of pavement, on the kerbstones and gutter, on the surface of the street and the droplet-covered bodywork of parked cars, the reflections from the streethlights shone and shimmered. From inside looking out, before you had to go back out into it, and with two pints inside you, it all had a way of even looking quite appealing.

Who can read “Hinges” without recognizing Annie’s grief, the pointless ubiquity of the best poems to read at a funeral, and the mother’s limp, unresponsive hand Annie tries to hold? Who hasn’t had bizarre memories pop up at such times, like the one Annie has as her dad’s funeral begins, of Joe Short, a man she “fancied” when she was little, who fixed a door she later realizes has similarities to the coffin in which her dad lies.

Who, of a certain age, hasn’t imagined losing their mind (and their memories) as Anna-Maria Anderson does on her eighty-second birthday in “Passport?” Swift treats this character—and all his characters—very tenderly, but uncompromisingly.

It was 6:30 a.m. Still dark. She sat, looking forward, braced and prepared, clutching the proof of her identity, but she was really somewhere else already and she knew, as well as she ever would, who she was. She sat and she waited. She waited. She waited for the light to flash.

Our group spent three weeks discussing these twelve tales, having our favorites and least favorites, but we agreed each story was, in its own way, a remarkable capture of what it means to be a human among humans. To grow older, to be formed by memory, to wait—knowing who we are—for the light to flash.

We equivocated a little over the title and cover since—together—they imply the stories will be about the aftermath to World War II, and that’s not true of all of them. But Swift touches on various other times of turmoil (the Cuban missile crisis, North Ireland, President Kennedy’s assassination, the riots of the sixties, the pandemic) as if to argue it’s always post-war somewhere, thus a tale may be told.

— Sharelle Moranville

Percival Everett’s novel, James, which recently won the 2025 Pulitzer for fiction, is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckelberry Finn told through the sensibility of the slave Jim.

Everett introduces the story with pages from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a 19^th Century composer who formed the first black minstrel troupe. Some of these songs, like “Old Dan Tucker” and “Turkey in the Straw,” were disconcertingly familiar to our group because we had learned them as children and sang them with innocent ignorance.

Everett rips away that band-aid of ignorance with Jim’s opening reflection:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day . . . Lighting bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door . . . Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the end of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.

Waiting for someone to get raped or beaten or burned alive or sold away from their family.

The little bastards, of course, are Huck and Tom conspiring to play some kind of demeaning joke on Jim the slave, a grown man who understands he must show white folks what they need to see: a docile darky, happy under the massa’s thumb. So Jim obligingly calls out to Huck and Tom, “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?” and introduces the fascinating construct that builds the irony that drives the story: the slaves are not the dumb, insensitive, superstitious, sub-human creatures the white folks need them to be. Among themselves, they speak in cultured voices with rich vocabularies, read the great thinkers, and parse the subtle difference between dramatic and proleptic irony. In the slave quarters, they drill the children in situational translations. How, for instance, to tell a white lady her house is on fire. Not by yelling, “Fire, fire!” because that is too direct, but by exclaiming, “Lawdy, missum, looky dere!” because whites must be the ones to name the trouble.

Miss Watson soon names the trouble that launches the story when she is overheard declaring her intention to sell Jim away from his wife and daughter, and Jim decides he must run—though he knows the horror of what can happen to a runaway slave. At the same time, Huck stages his own murder and runs to avoid the blows of his abusive father. When the Jim and Huck coincidentally end up together on Jackson Island, their river adventure begins. Sometimes they are together, and sometimes they are separated. They are always growing in their understanding of the world and their places in it, in their understanding of their connection to each other. They grapple with what it means to be black or white or slave or free.

The story is narrated by Jim in his “real” voice, and the tension from the irony of who this person really is, versus who white people believe he is, builds an intimacy with the reader that makes the pages fly by, sometimes showing foolishness, sometimes tenderness, sometimes the omnipresent violence of a slave’s world. Rape so common it’s almost banal, a slave hanged for stealing a pencil, a slave burned alive, a wife and young daughter sold to a slave breeding farm.

At the beginning of this gripping story, Jim is understandably reactive and runs away from the threat of being sold. But as the story develops, he becomes determinedly proactive. This turning occurs at the midpoint when he is caught up in Daniel Emmett’s racist minstrel show. He is sold as a slave, bought as a tenor. He becomes a black man who must be made blacker with shoe polish so people will believe he is white.

The wrenching irony of all this finally twists Jim from reactor into protagonist. He steals the journal with Daniel Emmett’s songs and the beautiful blank pages beyond them and runs like only a slave can run: this time, toward his wife and child to somehow save them. Eventually getting a pencil stub, he begins to write, which becomes a metaphor for his emerging fully into his own and daring to reveal his true self to the white world on the final page of a truly brilliant novel.

“Are any of you named Nigger Jim?”
I pointed to each of us.
“Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”
“And who are you?”
“I am James.
“James what?”
“Just James.”

Before James became the book everybody was reading and raving about, few of the people in our group were familiar with Percival Everett’s work. Now we are eager to read more.

— Sharelle Moranville