 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today, we are talking about a book that I was really, truly looking forward to Frankenstein and Baghdad by Akhmed Sadali. Sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong. I was interested in this book not because I'm a huge Frankenstein fan, but just because of the synopsis. I really enjoyed Victor Laval's retelling of the comic book series, His Frankenstein. This one sounded like it was going to be on par with that a literary take on not really the Frankenstein mythos, because it has very, very little to do with Frankenstein. I'm going to read you the back cover copy and then we're going to go from there. From the rubble strewn streets of US occupied Baghdad, Hadi, a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local cafe, collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive. First from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path, with white knuckle horror and black humor, Frankenstein and Baghdad captures the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq. I'm going to go ahead and say it didn't deliver on any of that. It was also a Man Booker International Prize finalist, and I have no idea why. The translation here, it was originally written in Arabic, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright. The writing was so plain and so boring, and the entire book is a telling, almost like it's very simplistic fairy tale style writing. And that's fine if you like that kind of thing, but I like a little more in the way, and I know I've said in the past that I like a certain simplicity to prose, but only if it carries the deep connotations or the poignancy is what I like. Something that seems surface level simple and is actually very, very deep. This book didn't do that for me. I think the biggest part that I was disappointed in was this first bit about how he collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. The book opens up with him putting one final piece on the corpse and then the corpse disappears. It was very disappointing that we didn't actually get to follow him throughout the city scavenging and doing these things that the back cover copy promised. And another thing was I did not feel any white knuckle horror or any black humor. I could have completely missed it of course, humor is subjective, but I didn't laugh at anything. In fact, I was very, very bored the entire time. I'm someone who enjoys literary fiction. I really enjoy literary takes on genre material. And that's what I was hoping this would be. Unfortunately, it wasn't. It's a very bland, not even a retelling of Frankenstein, a very bland kind of magical realism that didn't do anything for me. I'm not going to give it one star because this isn't hot garbage. This is well above hot garbage. It just wasn't to my liking. So I'm going to say that it was okay, which is on Goodreads that's two stars, or two stars means it was okay. I don't recommend it, of course, but I always recommend that you read a book for yourself, and I would especially love to hear from anyone who has read this and liked it, or like me, didn't like it. But I would love to hear from someone who has read the original Arabic, the native tongue that this was written in. I would love to know if it's considered beautiful in its native tongue, or if it was supposed to be as good as it was in the translated version. I was very shocked that this book was up for a man-booker international prize, and it was a finalist because it is so plain, Jane. There's not much metaphor. The horror is very, very dumbed down to the point where if I had to compare it to something like watching, you know, if you're looking for porn, you end up with basic instinct. You know, that's the kind of thing. That's how non-graphic it was. It did have some pretty, I don't know, it had some pretty severe violence, but it was all written so plainly that I didn't do anything to me. It definitely didn't shock me. So yeah, I'm very, very disappointed in this one, and if it wasn't for how bad elevation was by Stephen King, this would probably be my biggest disappointment of the year. So have you read Frankenstein in Baghdad? If you have, please let me know. If you're planning to read it, let me know. Leave all those comments down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!