Angsty teenager Mary Shelley is not interested in carrying on her family’s celebrated legacy of being a great writer, but she soon discovers that she has the not-so-celebrated (and super-secret) Shelley power to heal monsters, just like her famous ancestor, and those monsters are not going to let her ignore her true calling anytime soon.

The Shelley family history is filled with great writers: the original Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the acclaimed mystery writer Tawny Shelley, cookbook maven Phyllis Shelley…the list goes on and on. But this Mary Shelley, named after her great-great-great-great-great grandmother, doesn’t want anything to do with that legacy. Th2020en a strangely pale (and really cute) boy named Adam shows up and asks her to heal a wound he got under mysterious circumstances, and Mary learns something new about her family: the first Mary Shelley had the power to heal monsters, and Mary has it, too. Now the monsters won’t stop showing up, Mary can’t get her mother Tawny to leave her alone about writing something (anything!), she can’t tell her best friend Rhonda any of this, and all Mary wants is to pass biology.

I was excited when I read the synopsis of this, as I love stories that have a twist including famous authors or their descendants. I really enjoyed following Mary, a descendant of Mary Shelley, who is expected to follow the long line of writers in her family. She finds out pretty quickly that her normal teenage life of struggling in school and having family issues is not what it seems. Her adventures from there are comical and portray a struggle for her between doing what she’s expected to do and what she wants to do – as well as actually figuring out what she wants to do.

I also really enjoyed the art style, it seemed to perfectly capture the different characters and the different members and ancestors of Mary’s family. All in all it was a fun story and take on a famous figure’s descendant.

Happy reading!