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The Lady Janies are back with their second book about a historical Mary. This time, they set their sights on improving the life of novelist Mary Shelley, famously remembered for Frankenstein.
Each of the Jane and Mary books introduces a supernatural/paranormal element. Here, Mary Godwin learns she is a fae: she has a magical ability to make what she imagines real. Her fae godmother introduces her to Ada Byron (known to history by her married name of Ada Lovelace) and says she’ll be teaching them both how to use their abilities.
Ada’s father is the famous poet Lord Byron, though she’s never met him. Despite her lineage, she has no interest in poetry or art. Math and engineering are her passion and where her incredible talents lie. Mary’s parents are both writers, and she wants to write, too. But she has yet to come up with an idea. It would also be nice to impress her secret beau, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Ada works constantly on all kinds of projects, calculations and algorithms. Her latest is Practical Automaton Number One, or PAN. This machine will do far more than the automatons that are merely pretty. It will change the world! But she just has to figure out how to make it actually autonomous. Here, Mary’s help is coming in handy. Ada is working hard with the fae godmother, but she has yet to create anything from her imagination. But Mary is a natural. So the two work together on PAN. And then one night, PAN turns into a living being.
Of course, any story about a creature that comes aliiiiive! requires a mad-scientist villain. Mary and Ada have to evade said villain, protect Pan, protect themselves and evade the clutches of men who would use their work as their own and put them in their places as women. It’s quite a lot, but these two women can probably just pull it off.
My Imaginary Mary is another fun and clean young adult book with romance, adventure and humor. I think it’s my favorite now after the first Jane. The story takes a ton of liberties with history to give these women more their due. Somewhere in the middle, I took out my phone and read through the Wikipedia entries on Mary and Ada, as well as their parents and spouses and other people in their lives and in the book. It gave me a better perspective on what exactly the authors used and improved for them in terms of fairness, feminism and love.
Rated: Mild. There are two uses of the name of Deity and one or two instances of mild language. Violence includes a villain kidnapping a character, tying her up, and giving her a few shocks of electricity, as well as a passage where he ties up a number of other characters and threatens them with shocks or death. Kissing occurs in several scenes, and there are a few instances of mild references to sex or anatomy.
