Most modern takes on Pygmalion are pretty negative because, when you get right down to it, carving yourself an idealised woman because actual women with hopes, dreams, flaws and, not to point too fine a point on it, *agency* just don’t hit the spot is fucked all the way up.

I not only want, but need to feel as if I'm swept away into another time and that was not the case here. I'm sorry, I genuinely thought I could suspend disbelief enough to find the quirky humor in this but its just too gross for me. It was very strange and not at all in keeping with the rest of the book given what the siblings had been doing.Yes, the gothic mansion was interesting, but you don't really get a dark or foreboding feeling from it. I mean, the fact Lucy and Joshua are, in their own ways, deeply weird people is why The Hating Game speaks to me as deeply and particularly as it does. But when a second suitor emerges to aid their quest, Angelika wonders if she was too hasty inventing a solution.

I don’t want it to come across that I am excessively condemning Angelika for doing the very thing that men have been doing in fiction literally since before Jesus. But Angelika is a romance heroine, not a horror villain, and I wish I’d had a better sense that both her, and the book as a whole, understood that re-shaping someone, then forcing them to live as your dependent in mental and physical torment (Will is explicitly in pain the whole book and his recovery of self-agency is represented largely by gardening) isn’t all that cute, no matter how disenfranchised or unloved you feel. If feels as if she is being left behind all alone, with no partner to share her privileged life with. Obvs they’re all good changes, but the fact that she clung so tightly to her brother after their parents died and so much of her personality and achievements are based off of their sibling relationship and camaraderie to THEN clinging herself to Will so tightly and seeing all these rapid fire changes? and patchwork boy is brought back to life, and angelika expects him to love her immediately with essentially no acknowledgement to his former existence as a potentially married man.Filled with carriages, candlesticks, and corpses, Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match is the spooky-season reimagining of the well-known classic that reminds us to never judge a man by his cadaver! In this reimagining of the classic tale, our heroine, having run out of suitors willing to accept her modern ways, reanimates her ideal man (Will),. In that the sense that the various plot threads are resolved via an extremely literal deus ex machina.