
This post contains affiliate links.
Welcome to Once Upon a Retelling! I'm a huge fan of retellings, and I'm really interested in hearing about authors' own love of the original stories, and what inspired them to retell those stories. And so Once Upon a Retelling was born, a feature in which I interview authors about their versions of well-loved tales.
Today, I'm really excited to have Sharon Dogar stopping by the blog to discuss Monsters, her retelling of Mary Shelley's life. Read to the end for a giveaway of an proof of Monsters (which was sent to me for free by Andersen Press for the purposes of providing an honest review).
Can you tell us a little about Monsters? What kind of a retelling of Mary Shelley’s life is it?
Monsters is a retelling of Mary’s life from just before she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (aged 16 in 1814) to the publication of her own novel Frankenstein in 1820. In these few short years Mary and her step-sister Claire, eloped with an aristocratic atheist poet, became unmarried mother’s and flirted with the idea of poly-amory. Monsters follows Mary and Claire as they try to understand what it might mean to be intelligent, radical young women who refuse to conform to the early nineteenth century idea of what a woman should be. There were other women at the time, such as Jane Austen, who challenged the status quo, but she did it secretly, where Mary and Claire made public their beliefs, and in consequence were both ostracised and ridiculed.
Today, I'm really excited to have Sharon Dogar stopping by the blog to discuss Monsters, her retelling of Mary Shelley's life. Read to the end for a giveaway of an proof of Monsters (which was sent to me for free by Andersen Press for the purposes of providing an honest review).

Monsters is a retelling of Mary’s life from just before she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (aged 16 in 1814) to the publication of her own novel Frankenstein in 1820. In these few short years Mary and her step-sister Claire, eloped with an aristocratic atheist poet, became unmarried mother’s and flirted with the idea of poly-amory. Monsters follows Mary and Claire as they try to understand what it might mean to be intelligent, radical young women who refuse to conform to the early nineteenth century idea of what a woman should be. There were other women at the time, such as Jane Austen, who challenged the status quo, but she did it secretly, where Mary and Claire made public their beliefs, and in consequence were both ostracised and ridiculed.