A stunning Frankenstein spin-off
Pádraig Kenny, author of Stitch
More than two centuries after its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is proving fertile ground for children’s authors, with Lita Judge’s Mary’s Monster, Emma Carroll’s Strange Star and Jim Benton’s Franny K Stein among a host of recent titles inspired by the book and its genesis. Few modern spin-offs touch on the complexity of Shelley’s original work. But this latest novel by the Irish author Pádraig Kenny is a stunning exception.
The hero of Kenny’s novel is Stitch, a “boy” who has been brought to life by Professor Hardacre, who dies at the novel’s outset. In company with his fellow creation Henry Oaf, Stitch has been kept all his life in gothic seclusion, in a castle buried in the woods. “Every day is the same. He wakes up in his turret room with its grey stone walls and its rickety old bed and the cobwebbed window with the sun creeping through it.”
Stitch and Henry are not like other boys. Stitch, for example, never feels hungry (he “tried eating once” but “didn’t like it”), his skin is grey, and parts of him are misshapen. And yet they are capable of the full gamut of human emotion – evidenced in their beautifully articulated sense of grief following the death of their elusive creator. (As Henry asks Stitch: “Where is the Professor gone? Where is his voice? Where is his mind? Where are his ideas and thoughts? Where are his dreams?”) When Hardacre’s sinister nephew arrives to take over his uncle’s laboratory, the boys discover that he intends to use Henry as his next scientific experiment. Can they escape his wicked clutches, and survive in a world in which they risk perpetual ostracisation?
Kenny’s previous children’s books have also touched on Shelley’s ideas, but this novel is in many ways his most ambitious. On the one hand, it is a fast-paced adventure, throughout which Kenny’s simple prose and short, cliff-hanger chapters (the whole novel is less than 200 pages) will keep even less confident readers on tenterhooks. But he resists any temptation to give his hero magical powers. As he explains in a foreword: “If [Stitch] had a power, I wanted it to be his boundless optimism, his belief in the goodness of people and his innate kindness.” It is through this focus on Stitch’s humanity that Kenny brilliantly captures the pathos of Shelley’s novel, which is so often lost in the retelling.
Stitch is published by Walker Books at £7.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
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