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 This book caught me by surprise. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of contemporary relationship novels, but this one - I loved.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Cleopatra_and_Frankenstein_-_Coco_Mellors.pdf, Cleopatra_and_Frankenstein_-_Coco_Mellors.epub They meet cute, and begin spouting off impossibly clever lines: all those sharp, witty retorts that you and I only think of twenty minutes after the fact. Book Genre: Adult, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, Fiction, Health, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Mental Health, New York, Romance the characters are cool, but I did hate eleanor. and I kiiiinda hated cleo but just because I know people like her are insufferable in real life. in books I love sad art bitches like cleo so whatever. everybody seems to love eleanor because she is down to earth and funny but to me she was so mediocre. MY OWN LIFE IS MEDIOCRE I DON’T NEED TO READ ABOUT MEDIOCRE PEOPLE. the fact that she gets it all (won’t say what) made me furious. like GO HOME TO YOUR MOM AND LEAVE MY CLEO ALONE. I stayed attached to my tracic awfully flawed heroine, I guess that’s my greek side in me, whatever¿ (GIVE ME MORE TRAGIC AWFUL HEROINES OKAY?) it’s just good people bore me, terrible people are more interesting in literature. and I love toxic love in books, movies whatever GIVE IT TO ME ALL. while the book jumps around between a cast of characters running full-speed around new york, they all feel fleshed out and their perspectives are equally as absorbing as the one before, with witty humour laced throughout. along with being a tender and painfully realistic character study, the book provides explorations of love, marriage, desire, friendship, art, addiction, and mental illness. but most of all, it seems that the book is about the journey to discovering who you really are and what you really want - a journey which seems to never really be complete.Cleopatra and Frankenstein is definitely a character driven book rather than one with a fast paced plot. Neither Cleo nor Frank are particularly likeable characters and I found them to be quite shallow and pretentious, especially at the beginning.

I found Cleopatra and Frankenstein to be a great debut by Coco Mellors and I’m excited to read what she writes next. You may also be interested in: Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last. I squint into the icy sunlight. The path sparkles with a thin layer of frost. Everything is hard and bright, like I’m looking from inside a diamond”. Many of the people in Cleo's life are also somehow both unrealistic and uninteresting, like her drug addicted and toxic gay best friend (cliché, cliché) best friend Quentin and her brief love interest Anders (an older man who sleeps with younger women and doesn't view them as people, how original). New York City at the start of the 21st-century – pre-financial crisis, pre-Trump, pre-Covid – is captured with near-devotional lushness in this nostalgic debut. It’s an urban playground that struggling painter Cleo, 24 years old and stylishly British, is on the brink of being exiled from, her student visa due to expire in mere months, when she meets Frank, a fortysomething ad agency owner with a nice line in elevator chitchat. They wed on a whim to calamitous effect on both sides. In terms of depth, this novel is more Jay McInerney than Hanya Yanagihara, but Mellors proves herself a poetic chronicler of inky gloom as well as twinkly surfaces. Unattached: Essays on SinglehoodThere’s nothing wrong with writing books that are ripe for adaptation. Literary fiction is full of critically adored authors who hustled other jobs to pay the bills, and novels turned into series have given us some of our greatest television. But the type of enlightenment presented in certain novels, in which easy access to money makes chasing one’s art a matter only of finding oneself, ignores a world on fire with chaos and inequality. And it tends not to make for great TV either. 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. 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.

The last thing I'll say is that lately I have been holding a pen in my hand while I read, but I'm rarely prompted to use it. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love. 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. yep, too much wit, swooning, tidbits, themes, dialogue, life quandaries, perplexing showy sentences, and cheesiness,……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.”) 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”.

This is Mellors’ debut novel, and it’s clear that she knows a world built on flash and substances (but not substance) is bound to crumble. She has written some extraordinary sentences and shows a great talent for dialogue. And she cannily sets Gen X artists who found a way to combine art with commerce against millennials who were raised to grasp at shiny objects that wound up beyond their reach. Her party scenes play out the inevitable clash: youth and money, mutually envious. Redemption for some of her characters will come with the recognition that the envy is misplaced and that developing a sense of self means reaching for higher-hanging fruit. I felt as a whole the mental health aspects, including addiction and depression were handled sensitively. If I was to be slightly critical, I felt Cleo’s depression was slightly glamourised. Beautiful, suicidal Cleo who no man could resist. While I didn’t fully warm to Cleo and Frank, there were characters in the book that I did really like. I really enjoyed Eleanor’s sections written in first person narrative. Her interactions with her mother were both amusing and poignant at times. I also adored big-hearted Santiago.

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The recently released “Cleopatra and Frankenstein” by NYU alum Coco Mellor has taken social media by storm, particularly TikTok, where a hashtag for the book has garnered more than 3.1 million views on videos using it. Set in New York City, the novel opens with an endearing elevator meet-cute between protagonists Cleo and Frank. Frank is the 40-something-year-old owner of an advertising firm and Cleo is a 24-year-old aspiring artist from England. Right off the bat, Frank and Cleo’s electric dynamic pulls readers in . 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. There was the subterranean Oyster Bar ….served with dialogue about childhood trauma, masturbation and a four-in-a-half year old who had her first orgasm. The more I read, the more I actually wanted to read. The characters had more depth as the book progressed and while I can’t say I warmed completely to the Cleo and Frank, I began to understand them better. 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.