Title: Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend
Series: Fangville High: Book One
Author: Dylan James
Publisher: Deep Hearts YA
Length: 142 Pages
Category: Young Adult, Fantasy
At a Glance: Dylan James put a lot of heart and imagination into Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend. At times sweet, funny, and delightfully quirky, the story is not without a message.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Victor Frankenstein is having the suckiest junior year at Fangville High.
He’d always been content with his place in school—he has his best friend Igor, the occasional date with a cute werewolf, and his grades are decent. It’s never really bothered him that he’s on the lowest level of the school’s social hierarchy.
But all of that changes when an incubus wants to make out with him. Not just any incubus, but the hunkiest and most popular incubus at school. Just as Victor thinks his life is going to get way better, it all comes crashing down when he learns this is all a joke and the punchline is Victor being humiliated in front of the entire school.
Now he’s on a mission—to exact revenge on the incubus, to score an even hotter boyfriend, to climb to the top of the social ladder, and to claim his destiny as the most awesome mad scientist ever.
How will he accomplish all this? By building the boyfriend of his dreams from spare parts he and Igor dig up at the cemetery.
That’ll work.
Right?
Review: Being a teenager is hard. Being a human teenager in a school full of monsters is the absolute worst.
Just ask Victor Frankenstein.
Victor is the great-great-great-great nephew of the Victor Frankenstein. Yeah, that Victor Frankenstein…. But even a legacy like this doesn’t offer young Victor any sort of cachet at Fangville High. The truth is that Victor will never be able to overcome his single greatest defect, according to his classmates—he’s a mundane human in a school full of werewolves, vampires, incubi, zombies, and soul-suckers—and the Filthy Four never waste an opportunity to make sure Victor’s humiliation is complete. There’s a final straw—isn’t there always?—and it’s what prompts Victor to dig (no pun intended) into his great-great-great-great uncle’s past, comb through his journal, and come up with what could turn out to the be the best…or the absolute worst…revenge plan ever. Victor won’t know unless he tries, though, and so he enlists his best friend Igor to act as his accomplice.
Dylan James put a lot of heart and imagination into Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend. At times sweet, funny, and delightfully quirky, the story is not without a message. The boy Victor pieces together and reanimates for the purpose of showing off his own prowess in things non-human—and maybe to be his boyfriend too?—becomes the very epitome of the human monster. At least in high school terms. There are some introspective and touching moments as well, especially as Victor learns more about his ancestor’s hopes and failures, and no few epiphanies about playing with the natural order of things, the pitfalls and consequences of not thinking ahead, and the motivation behind doing something without calculating the potential outcomes. Things may backfire for Victor in a spectacular way, but, in the end, the greatest lesson he learns is to appreciate what he already has.
Being grounded for a month was worth all the trouble.
I enjoyed this little book a lot. Igor is such a great friend to Victor, supportive and understanding, and I was thrilled to bits when he got his own happy ending. Full of charm and the makings of a world I want to spend more time in, and with characters I want to get to know better (even the nasty ones), I look forward to more from the Fangville High gang.
You can buy Frankenstein Builds a Boyfriend here:
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