Those looking for a realistic depiction of Mary Shelley’s life will not be satisfied, but goth-leaning teenagers looking for a lighthearted summer read will be delighted. As wth their previous efforts – which have included fantastical retellings of the worlds of subjects as disparate as Calamity Jane and Lady Jane Grey – this series takes these real-life women to new locations and into different, often supernaturally-influenced situations. With it, Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows add another volume to their Lady Janies series – and nope, it’s not about Marie Curie as they’d previously said it would be, it’s about Mary Shelley and mathematician Ada Lovelace, who shares the narrative with Mary. With comic genius and a truly electrifying sense of adventure, Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows continue their campaign to turn the classics on their head in this YA fantasy that’s perfect for fans of Frankenstein and The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.My Imaginary Mary is fun, fizzy and completely off the wall. But when their dream team results in a living, breathing, thinking PAN, Mary and Ada find themselves hunted by a mad scientist who won't stop until he finds out how they made a real boy out of spare parts. When fate connects our two masterminds, Mary and Ada learn that they are fae-magical people with the ability to make whatever they imagine become real. Practical Automaton Number One, is Ada's greatest idea a machine that will change the world, if only she can figure out how to make him truly autonomous. Alas, no matter how precise Ada’s calculations, there’s always a man willing to claim her ingenious ideas as his own. But her passions lie far beyond the arts-in mechanical engineering, to be exact. Ada Lovelace knows a thing or two about superstar parents, what with her dad being Lord Byron, the most famous poet on Earth.

Mary may have inherited the brilliant mind of her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but she lives a drab life above her father’s bookstore, waiting for an extraordinary idea that’ll inspire a work worthy of her parentage-and impress her rakishly handsome (and super-secret) beau, Percy Shelley.

It’s aliiiiiiiive! New York Times bestselling authors of My Lady Jane are back with the electric, poetic, and (almost) historical tale of the one and only Mary Shelley.

My Imaginary Mary by Cynthia Hand