Angelmonster

Veronica Bennett's lush reimagining of the life of Mary Shelley on the eve of her authorship of the classic gothic novel Frankenstein is a gripping story of love and obsession. In the spring of 1814, poet Percy Shelley enters the life of young Mary Godwin like an angel of deliverance. Seduced by his radical and romantic ideas, she flees with him and her stepsister to Europe, where they forge a hardscrabble life while mingling with other free-spirited artists and poets. Frowned on by family and society, persecuted by gossip, and plagued by jealousy, Mary becomes haunted by freakish imaginings and hideous visions. As tragedy strikes, not once but time and again, Mary begins to realize that her dreams have become nightmares, and her angel . . . a monster. Now the time has finally come for the young woman who would become Mary Shelley to set her monster free.

VERONICA BENNETT began her writing career as a freelance journalist when her two children were small. She soon moved into fiction, and her first novel was published in 1998. These days, the children are grown,and she works part-time as a college English lecturer. ANGELMONSTER, she says, "came about during a lesson on recasting classic novels for children. The text under discussion was FRANKENSTEIN, and I began to think about doing a book for children based on the early life of the author, revealing only at the end that she would go on to write FRANKENSTEIN when she grew up. An idea was born, but when I began the research, I realized that the dramatic events of Mary Shelley's life lent themselves much better to a more grown-up story." Veronica Bennett lives in England. This is her first book with Candlewick Press.