Adam, Mine., the sixth young adult novel by National Book Award longlisted author K. Ancrum (The Corruption of Hollis Brown), is a stunning love letter to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that highlights its central characters' capacities for humanity and monstrosity.
In 1890, 17-year-old Victor Frankenstein toils away as an alchemy student, sneered at by peers who deem his medical interests a grotesque perversion. Victor is insistent that by the time he graduates, he will have found a way to bring the dead back to life. But after repeated failures, his desperation reaches a fever pitch. When Victor meets soft-eyed Elias Hilfiker, an 18-year-old barkeep with "sugar sickness" (diabetes), Victor justifies violence against the bartender by calling him "a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain." Victor abducts Elias and uses an untested alchemical spell to feign Elias's resurrection. But Victor is unprepared for one of the invocation's results: the young men become irrevocably bound.
Frankenstein has been reinvented countless times, many of the iterations constructed through the lens of scientific ethics and philosophy. But Ancrum, less interested in a faithful retelling than in the emotion behind Shelley's novel, creates instead a warped mirror: her characters make magic instead of science and cheat in place of performing miracles as she plucks at the thread of connection between people who have wronged each other. Ancrum honors the Romantic movement to which Shelley belonged with prose that slices and soothes--but her greatest trick is the subtle sleight of hand that blurs the line between human and monster, demanding that readers reconsider which is which. --Mariel Fechik DesLaurier, librarian, freelance reviewer, music journalist