Hot Summer Read: This Dark Endeavour
by Kenneth Oppel
Konrad and Viktor are twins, living a charmed life at the Frankenstein family chateau in Geneva. Their days are full of fun and adventure until one day, they stumble upon the family’s secret library, the Biblioteka Obscura, filled with dark, mysterious books. When Konrad falls gravely ill, Viktor is impatient with the doctors’ feeble efforts and anxiously returns to the dark texts of the secret library, where he discovers a formula for the elixir of life. On a quest to save his twin, Viktor and his friends Elizabeth and Henry set out to find a mysterious and powerful alchemist, and risk their own lives to find a way to turn back death. Kenneth Oppel delivers with this prequel to Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
I always enjoy Oppel’s writing, and this book was no exception – it draws you right into the world and the characters that he has created, and the story keeps you involved the whole way through. I do really like how he built young Victor Frankenstein as a boy who has some flaws that will clearly allow his obsessions to take root, yet also shows how they start out as searching for something for a good cause. He is not himself a bad person here, but the start of his being warped is very plausibly imagined, and it works. I also loved how clear it is that Oppel has done his homework – there are clever little references tucked throughout the book to the original story of Frankenstein and the life of its author, Mary Shelley, which are fun to pick out. Now, having just finished the one book, I am very excited about getting into the next one now!
If you’d like to get a feel for the novel before running to the library to get your own copy, you can read the first three chapters online here! It’s enough to get a good feel – and get hooked into the story! Now that you can’t wait to read the rest – you can place a hold right here, or see which branch has a copy.
Oppel’s own website has all sorts of other stuff to explore, too, if you want to go a little deeper into the story or his writing. You can find reviews, videos, pages from Victor Frankenstein’s notebook, and discussion guides for talking about it with a group, or even to use as starts for essays, if you should find such a thing handy for next year!
I also always find book trailers quite interesting. How do they decide to present it? Is it just like the book jacket info, or do we learn more? How do they set a mood? How much creativity does it seem went into it? take a look at two trailers for this book, and see what you think:
Here’s the official trailer, from the publisher:
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/wk5MnElS0EE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
And here is a trailer made by a middle schooler:
What do you think? Which is better? And what would you do as a trailer for your favourite book?
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