Cleopatra and Frankenstein: ‘Move over Sally Rooney: this is the hottest new book’ - Sunday Times

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What is it? It’s this chilling, anxiety-inducing moroseness. I want to strangle the characters because they’re so awkward and annoying and they’re sabotaging their own relationships. But, also, I care. I care so much. It’s a hard thing to explain to sane humans.

I found it hard to relate to arty and vulnerable Cleo and the rich and impulsive Frank. However as the story progressed I began to empathise with them both. I was infuriated by them one moment and then rooted for them the next. Despite there being potentially triggering moments, I didn’t feel depressed when reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It was more melancholic than outright depressing. It doesn’t descend into misery porn in the way books like A Little Life did. Frank presents Cleo with the possibility of happiness, artistic freedom, and the chance to apply for a Green Card. Their spontaneous marriage has unforeseen consequences that alter not only their lives but also the lives of those around them. Cleopatra and Frankenstein Book Review: My Opinion yep, too much wit, swooning, tidbits, themes, dialogue, life quandaries, perplexing showy sentences, and cheesiness,…… Everyone Frank knew was the greatest ‘something’ in the world. His half-sister Zoe was the greatest actor, his best friend Anders was the greatest art director and amateur soccer player, and Cleo, well, Cleo was the most talented painter, the deepest thinker, the most beautiful woman on earth. Why? Because Frank wouldn’t have married anyone else”.

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I guess, considering that it's been a month since I read this and I haven't been able to stop reading or talking or thinking about it, five stars. I love her so much I don't know what to do with myself. Her life, her jokes, her work, her allusions. Her mom and dad, her brother, her friends. Her house and her train rides and - I am genuinely getting worked up and I have to stop. while this seems like the classic ‘young twenty-something woman starts dating the older richer man’ story (which we all know and love), mellors’ unique narrative style offers a fresh new take. cleo and frank’s relationship is the strand which runs through everyone else’s lives, their tumultuous up and downs bleeding into the lives of their circle of friends and family. in essence it is a love story, albeit told through the eyes of others.

Cleo, a 24-year-old artist from Britain, fled to New York City to start anew and explore her artistic pursuits. As her student visa nears expiration, she meets Frank, a self-made man twenty years her senior, who leads a life of luxury that is entirely foreign to Cleo. And also, in addition to this, there was a character I loved so much that I cried through her chapters (of which there are only two), an insanely earnest and vulnerable moment the likes of which has never occurred to me ever. More than anything, Mellors shows how you can still love and care for someone, yet not be good for them. Frank and Cleo realize that their age gap, their experiences with broken families and their lifestyles ultimately make them less than compatible. Sometimes, loving another person means separating yourself from them to give them room to grow.

the whole younger woman/old man is a very tired hetero dynamic. maybe if the characters concerned are nuanced, interesting, or believable, maybe then i will bring myself to read yet another age-gap & vaguely toxic hetero romance but cleo and frank are not it. their first meeting is ridiculous, ludicrous even. of course she's beautiful and has a british accent. her hair is described as 'golden', her face, a 'performance', her clothes and makeup give her a vintage yet distinctive aura (i made the mistake of looking up coco mellors and could no longer divorce the author from the character...and i happen to find self-inserts cringe at the best of times). cleo has long fingers, smokes, she's artistic. i could keep on going...these ppl are boring and the author's attempts to make them into rooney-esque figures, well, tis' cringe. my life is too short and precious to me to waste my time on this earth reading bland stories. Frank, though he is a workaholic alcoholic with a younger wife and thereby also a cliché, somehow pulls off the grand accomplishment of being consistently intriguing to read about, as does his very annoying sister Zoë and her rarely present friend Audrey. Cleopatra and Frankenstein” is a compelling read for reasons beyond the core dynamic. The narration alternates between side characters’ perspectives, giving a chance for readers to construct their own account of the central romance. Some such narrators include Zoe, Frank’s sister; Santiago, a mutual friend whose party led to Frank and Cleo’s meet-cute; Anders, a former Scandinavian model and Frank’s best friend; Quentin, Cleo’s best friend; and Eleanor, one of Frank’s employees at the advertising firm.

If Manhattan were a drug, which one would it be? This is one of the profound questions raised by reading Coco Mellors’ tantalizing but blithe debut novel, “ Cleopatra and Frankenstein,” whose Manhattanites run on stimulants and drown in alcohol. Hers is a city of flash and fluttering movement, as if deliberately designed to distract its inhabitants (or those Mellors chooses to depict) from seeing that, beneath the surface, there’s no there there. The author offered different perspectives throughout the story, not just from Cleo and Frank, but from their friends and family members. It gave an insight into these characters’ motivations and feelings, as well as showing how they were perceived from the outside looking in. Where Zoe could be seen as flighty and irresponsible by her brother Frank, we realise that she’s actually quite vulnerable and scared. These insights made the characters feel more authentic and relatable. Cleopatra and Frankenstein Book Review: Summary A more fundamental concern is how easy it would be to imagine this pre-recession Gotham universe as a Netflix series. The city’s surfaces are attended to in cinematic detail; emotional connective tissue often consists of characters telling their friends about their awful childhoods and narrating character traits direct to camera. (A recent Times of London profile, after breathlessly proclaiming, “Move over Sally Rooney,” noted that Mellors is “already in discussion with several streamers.”)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, author of How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right I read this because everyone was comparing it to Sally Rooney, which I guess is appealing to me. But it brings all the stuff that irks me about Rooney— hipster millennials having endless navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual conversations about themselves and the universe —and misses out the key component that, for me, makes Rooney as engaging an author as she is irritating. When I first started reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I really struggled to get into it at the beginning. I think this was mostly due to not warming to the main characters. It all just felt a bit superficial and pretentious but the more I read, I think that was actually the point.