Man made boy by Jon Skovron
Allen and Unwin, 2013. ISBN 9781743315132.
(age: 12+) Recommended. Frankenstein's monster. Love. Mythology.
Humour. Boy, the son of Frankenstein's monster and the Bride, lives
with his parents in an underground series of rooms and caves beneath
Time Square. Known as The Show, the Trowe dug levels of living space
for the creatures shunned by the human race, Medusa, Sirens, Charon,
and Trolls, amongst others. Boy is a clever and intuitive computer
hacker and it is his skills that are nightly required to keep the
networks in the theatre going, attracting the audiences which comes
to be scared by the monsters.
But Boy is restless. He feels undervalued. He is bullied, and his
parents want to send him to Switzerland to stay with the
Frankenstein family. More importantly he loves Liel, a Troll. Having
developed a computer program that he thinks will change the world,
he rallies support from his online friends, packs his bag and
leaves.
Going into the human world is something many of the monsters dream
of doing, and it is an unknown world that Boy steps into. He moves
in with a hacker he knows from the internet but must find work to
live.
But one night he sees Liel, and she reveals she is there because of
an email he sent her. He is thrilled, but the question remains, just
who is hacking his system and sending information to people
purportedly from him.
Liel becomes housebound, her green skin not conducive to going
outside, and so Boy is forced to seek help from Luellen from The
Show who uses glamour to change his form and allow him to mix freely
with humans. As Liel becomes more hooked on using this drug, Boy
finds her shunning his company for her new human friends. On top of
all this, someone is stalking him. His program has developed a mind
of its own. The created has become a creator.
This is a great read, funny, warm and often moving. We follow Boy's
dreams of living in the human world with empathy, see him stride
through the streets avoiding questions and giving out the story that
his stitches are the result of a bad accident. When Liel appears,
his life is complete, but problems mount as someone is hacking his
computer, stalking them, and the problem of Liel's use of the drug
glamour becomes overwhelming. Leaving New York, Boy meets up with
the granddaughters of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and together they make
a road trip to New Mexico where another complex like The Show
exists, to seek answers from The Sphinx.
This book is a glowing mixture of many genres, adventure, crime,
romance, alienation, retelling of myths and will appeal to a wide
audience, particularly those who crave a long read in which the main
characters are so well drawn that the reader cares about their
fates. The one liners poke fun at the mythology surrounding
Frankenstein and many of the monsters involved, making this a laugh
out loud read, and in the end a story about what makes us human.
Fran Knight