Cleopatra and Frankenstein

De: Coco Mellors

Narrado por: Kit Griffiths

‘A tender, devastating and funny exploration of love and friendship and the yearning for self-evisceration. Coco Mellors is an elegant and exciting new voice’ PANDORA SYKES

New York is slipping from Cleo’s grasp. Sure, she’s at a different party every other night, but she barely knows anyone. Her student visa is running out, and she doesn’t even have money for cigarettes. But then she meets Frank. Twenty years older, Frank's life is full of all the success and excess that Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art—and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. He is everything she needs right now.

Cleo and Frank run head-first into a romance that neither of them can quite keep up with. It reshapes their lives and the lives of those around them, whether that’s Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender identity in the wake of her marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates after being cut off. Ultimately, this chance meeting between two strangers outside of a New Year’s Eve party changes everything, for better or worse.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is an astounding and painfully relatable debut novel about the spontaneous decisions that shape our entire lives and those imperfect relationships born of unexpectedly perfect evenings.

©2022 Coco Mellors (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Reseñas de la Crítica

‘Positively inhalable. I was intensely consumed by the world of Cleopatra and Frankenstein for a few happy days’ The Evening Standard

‘Friends who couldn’t get enough of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends will fall head over heels for Coco Mellor’s debut novel’ ES Magazine

‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein, the luminous debut novel from Coco Mellors, is a book about many things: It's a great, swooning love story; a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives; and a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York. But most of all, Mellors has written a devastatingly human book, at turns sharp and tender, that marks her as the rare writer whose sentences are as beautiful as they are wise. An unforgettable read’ Sam Lansky, author of The Gilded Razor and Broken People

‘A character driven epic thoroughly engrossing and entirely magnificent. It is thrilling to read a book that articles with nuance and compassion the way gender impacts every part of our lives. Sometimes you can just tell that a debut novel has been percolating and perfecting inside an author's mind until it is ready to leap into-and ultimately change-the world’ Adam Eli, author of The Queer Conscience

“Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut … strongly evoke[s] Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life… At its core, it’s a novel about how love and lovers are easily misinterpreted and how romantic troubles affect friends and family. A canny and engrossing rewiring of the big-city romance.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

‘Insistent, stylish and utterly captivating, the prose just sings.’ Heidi James, author of, The Sound Mirror

An Absolute Masterpiece!

There really aren’t no words to adequately describe how I feel about this story, about the characters— oh the characters!
Plus, the narrator of this audiobook is a new favorite, one of the best I’ve heard.

Authentic relationships to swoon over

This story felt soo real, the characters had depth and were fascinating to read, the relationships were complex and relatable. This was soo well written. I loved it.

Una historia de amor que se aleja del cliché

Este libro me ha hecho reír y emocionar
No es la típica historia de novela romántica … sino que muestra los cambios que los errores generan en una relación
Tiene un humor inteligente y original

Great, hearfelt and real.

4.5 ★

I really enjoyed this. While reading, I had no idea what I'd end up rating it, but the more I think about this book now, the more I like it.

The story follows Cleo (24) and Frank (45), who meet, quickly fall for each other, get married and then watch their relationship become increasingly toxic.

“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”

・❥・Cleo
I think her character is a pretty realistic portrayal of a women in her 20s. She is an artist, has a charming and charismatic personality, she is very outspoken and a feminist. And yet, on the inside she feels emotions very deeply, struggles with depression, and above all wants to be loved. Loved enough to be chosen over anything else. I'm not trying to throw women in any boxes, but I think Cleo is a character many people could resonate with, on some level. She makes many questionable or morally grey choices, has lot of issues, but I never questioned whether she's a good person.

・❥・Frank
Now, he is a troubled man. He was pretty charming in the beginning – a self made man with a strong work ethic, happy to help out Cleo, and truly enamored with her. Over time, though, he turns out to be just as lost as Cleo, but where for her it's more of a “trying to find out who i am” phase, for him it's just a “that's who I am, and I don't wan to change” time in life. He's figured out a way of life that works for him, and I think it's not even the idea change that scares him, just the fact that someone pointed out that his way was flawed and he <i>should</i> change.

・❥・Their relationship
I don't want to spoil to much here so I'll just say 2 things.
1. They love each other
2. They are not willing to change for each other .

Initially I was going to say that they didn't love each other enough to change, but I don't think that's the case. I just think their relationship wasn't the right environment for those changes to happen.

・❥・The writing
I loved it. I honestly enjoy that we don't get the full view into the characters' minds, just glimpses months apart. I do understand how that can be annoying, but I personally like this kind of writing. It resonates with me, and I think it's because it's how real-life relationships often work.

We also get a couple of chapters from the perspective of other characters, who are close with Cleo and Frank, and I enjoyed those too. I'm especially glad we got to see Eleanor's point of view, because, as always, I like to feel conflicted. I like when authors take a character that I want to dislike, show me their perspective and personality, and make me like them despite myself.

・❥・ Now, I've seen a lot of people saying that the characters' traits and feelings are over exaggerated and feel almost caricature-like. I get why someone wouldn't like that, but I don't think that's unintentional on the author's part. That's what literature often does. It takes a bunch struggles some people go through and gives them a face. The characters are sometimes stereotypical, yes, but that also makes them super interesting to read about.

・❥・ Lastly, all these characters are difficult, sometimes problematic, make bad choices, say awful things and will probably annoy you. But in the end, I still rooted for them. I wanted to see them heal, learn more about themselves, find out what's good for them, and focus on that.

・❥・The ending was perfect for the story. I did leave me with that “what do you mean that's it?!” kind of a feeling, but I do think that's the right way to end their story.

I really loved the story, 4.5 stars. If you enjoy literary-fiction in general or maybe Sally Rooney, you'd probably like this too.

𝓜𝔂 𝓯𝓪𝓿𝓸𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓺𝓾𝓸𝓽𝓮𝓼:

“Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.”

“Fondness was the best word she could think of to describe what they felt for each other. Fondness was warm but not tepid, the color of amber, more affectionate than friendship but less complicated than love.”

“He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other.”

“Those have to be the saddest words a person can utter.”
“What?”
“‘That’s just who I am.’”
“Why?”
“Because it shows a total unwillingness to change. That is not just who you are, Frank. It’s who you’ve become, who you choose to be. You just refuse to acknowledge the choice.”

Basic and vulgar

Annoying characters, poor description of a depression and the women are only pretty and broke/flawed/depressed and the men are all smart and successful.