This book features the Shelleys, Percy Byshe and Mary Godwin, and Mary’s half-sister Claire, and Lord Byron, and as soon as I realized that little fact, I knew that I would be somewhat ambivalent about the book. The Shelleys and their coterie, especially Percy and Byron, but really all of them, were not very good people. In fact, Percy Shelley was a predator who took advantage of at least two teenage girls and drove one of them to suicide. And Byron was even worse in the womanizing department. The tale of these two poets and their harem/community/obsessive fanbase is a sordid one.

And yet . . . The story, especially the famous story of the Villa Diodati and how the group challenged each other to write a ghost or horror story, and how Mary Godwin Shelley produced the tale of Frankenstein’s monster as a result of that challenge, has a particular and peculiar fascination. Just as the book Frankenstein is repellant and yet strangely fascinating at the same time, its origin story has inspired many an author to embroider and fill in the gaps in the Shelleys’ journey to Romantic fame.

“Yet I’ve also tried to make my story echo Mary Shelley’s in certain ways. Felix, Agatha, Elizabeth (Lizzie), Mr. Walton, and Moritz are all names taken from Frankenstein. Strange Star is about scientific ambition: Miss Stine experiments with electricity regardless of the consequences, just as Victor Frankenstein does in Shelley’s original. There is a blind character in Frankenstein who doesn’t judge people by their appearance. Many of the characters in Strange Star face prejudice because of how they look or who they are.
For me, Frankenstein is a great story, and Mary Shelley an inspirational woman. I really hope reading Strange Star will make you want to discover more about both for yourself.”

Well, not really. I think I know enough already. However, I did find that Strange Star, while rather a strange story itself, neither appeals to prurient interest by emphasizing the nasty details of the Shelleys lives not does it whitewash them and make them into kind, honorable people. The Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron in this book are portrayed as just the selfish, careless people that they most likely were without the author’s giving too much information for a middle grade or young adult audience.

Strange Star itself is a little dark, but it ends on a good note. As another author with a bad reputation once wrote, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” I daresay I like my Romantic poets fictionalized to some extent to take away the rough edges.

A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem: A Dastardly Plot by Christopher Healy.

A new series beginner by the author of The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom is something to look forward to with anticipation, and A Dastardly Plot lives up to my expectations. The book is set in 1883, the Age of Invention, and features appearances by great inventors such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, and George Eastman, to name a few of the many men who made the age of invention, inventive.

But where were all the women? Well, according to this fantastical version of history, the women were shut out of the Inventor’s Guild and out of the World’s Fair, disregarded, patronized, and ignored. It’s definitely a feminist take on madcap inventors who are out to save the world, but it never gets didactic or overbearing. Molly Pepper, daughter of the not-so-famous inventor, Cassandra Pepper, lives with her mother behind their pickle shop and helps with the inventing. However, Molly doesn’t really have the inventing bug, not does she want to be an inventor when she grows up. And right now, at age twelve, Molly is too busy trying to keep her mother alive, solvent, and following her dream of exhibiting her inventions at the World’s Fair, to worry too much about growing up or about what she will do if and when she does. It’s Molly’s new friend Emmett Lee who has the gift for new ideas and inventions, but it’s Molly who must save the day with her practicality and persistence when villains want to destroy the Worlds Fair and take over the government of the entire country.

A Dastardly Plot is a detective adventure fantasy with lots of chases and explosions and hairbreadth escapes and and mysterious disguises and twists and turns as well as a growing friendship between Molly Pepper and Emmett Lee and a mother/daughter relationship that is characterized by dysfunction and growth, too. Readers of all ages can enjoy this story with its humor and heart, and I predict that most of those readers will be looking forward to the next installment in the story of the Peppers and Emmett Lee and the inventors of New York.

By the way, there is an afterword in which Mr. Healy tells his readers “what’s real and what’s not in A Dastardly Plot.” Such information is definitely needed, since most of the book falls in the “not” category. Still it may inspire young readers to research for themselves and find out more about Edison, Bell, Tesla, Eastman, Nellie Bly, Sarah Goode, Hertha Marks, Josephine Cochrane, Margaret Knight, Mary Walton, and other inventors and luminaries of the late nineteenth century. Also featured in the story are the Brooklyn Bridge, President Chester Arthur, Ulysses S. Grant, Menlo Park, and the National Geographic Society. Lots of jumping-off places for more learning and adventure. (I want to read more about all those female inventors for myself.)