Cleopatra and Frankenstein Review: Monstrously Boring
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
There’s a dude called Frank, and a gorgeous greenish-eyed girl called Cleo, they meet at a New Year’s Eve party, joke about their names sounding like pop culture figures ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’. Then they hook up, get married, sort of fall in love, run through some trouble. Because, boohoo, life sucks. And don’t be misled by the title, this is a straightforward, contemporary fiction romance.
Page 121, it was only until I got to page 121 of ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ that it finally got readable and interesting. That’s when author Coco Mellors finally introduces a new and realistic character in a world cluttered with unbearably pretentious ‘good looking’/’glittering’ people. Until then it took me 12 days to get to page 121, and only 1 day to finish the rest of the over 200 pages. Until then, I was softly crying inside, and loudly bitching to my friends in a group chat about how books like these slow down my reading pace and reading goals for the year. Until then, this book was barely one star out of five. Now I am settling for 2 stars, which by Goodreads standards is supposed to mean ‘it was okay’.
‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ is simply about a stunningly beautiful, ‘Roman Goddess Level Gorgeous’ (the author repeats this fact several times through the book) Cleo, a 20-something art graduate, hooking up with 40-something Frank, a successful advertising executive, and them referring to each other as Cleopatra and Frankenstein maybe 4 times in the book. The two quickly get married for Cleo’s to extend her visa and stay on in New York. But as is with rushed marriages based on physical attraction, they realize their ‘love’ isn’t the lasting kind of love. And the book follows them being unbearably pretentious (I am aware I’ve already used this term, but well, the author keeps repeating stuff in the book too) and annoying.
Cleo becomes a bored, whiny, artsy brat who doesn’t even make art anymore, and that’s supposed to be her character arc, fine, but nothing about her is likable, except for her legendary looks. Meanwhile Frank drowns himself in work and alcohol and starts to fall for someone else. You know that character from page 121, she is a 30-something and joins Frank’s work-place as a temporary copywriter. Let’s just call her ‘Page 121’, to keep this review spoiler-free, in case you decide to read the novel, despite my criticism. And of course, there’s a high chance you may like it more than I did. Frank and Page 121 have an easy chemistry and their banter in the second-half of ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ is quite witty, funny, and entertaining.
Coco Mellors’ writing style for the novel is mostly reader-friendly. It’s not impressively literary, lucid, or characteristic, the sentences are well-woven, but without any striking details. Although, it does seem like ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ is laden with deliberate familiar philosophical musings meant to encourage readers to share as ‘quotes’. For instance, Page 121 has a lovely relationship with her mother, but her mum often talks like a ‘self-help book’ author, instead of a regular maternal human being.
Except for Page 121, and an obese chef trying to lose weight, everybody is exceedingly good-looking in the book, which is usually their defining characteristic. For instance, Frank’s young step-sister Zoey, is a drop-dead gorgeous aspiring actor, and unlike Frank, she is black-american. Zoey is essentially Cleo in a different skin color, and seems to exist in ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ only for token black representation. She is still in college, lives like a rich trust fund kid, and gets aggressively worked up over racial issues even though she never faces any sort of discrimination in the novel.
‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ aspires to be a Jazz age literary novel for the 2020s: it’s all about sex, drugs, alcohol, money, parties, infidelity, and beautiful people doing annoying things. Thankfully, some of the primary characters do ‘grow up’ towards the climactic chapters, or at least pretend to, and Coco Mellors wraps the story in a conveniently closing chapter that doesn’t match with the rest of the tone, but will be satisfactory for many readers.
Rating: 2 stars on 5.
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