Suzanne Weyn

The BarCode Tattoo. Everybody is getting it. The new ID for everyone over the age of 17. They say it will make your life easier, and soon you won't be able to do anything or go anywhere without one - especially when the Government starts to criminalize those who've refused to get one.
Kayla knows something isn't right with the BarCode, since her father killed himself because of it. After her mother set fire to their home in an attempt to burn off her own, Kayla must flee for her life as she show more is now being accused of horrible crimes that stem from her being untattooed, which in itself is now a criminal offense. On the run, she meets up with a group of resistors called “Decode” and hides out in the Adirondack Mountains with them while preparing for a revolution and discovering the sinister truth about what's REALLY in the BarCode tattoos.
In this futuristic dystopian novel there are no more American Presidents - just Corporate Dictators, Fascist Regimes, Border Walls, Billionaires running the United States Government into the ground, Human and Civil rights being stripped from the population daily, and a growing resistance movement. This book was written in 2004 but takes place in 2025. The last time I read this book was in 2021, and it was crazy the amount of parallels I was seeing to the American political climate back then. Now it is just plain SCARY how alike the real world has become to the dystopian world of the novel.
While the pace of the book switched from being fast and action packed to slow and repetitive, the overall plot line worked nicely, and gives you all the background information for the next book (Which is where all the good action is in terms of moving the plot along). show less

Budding journalist Jane Taylor grew up in an unconventional household. Her mother is a prominent medium in Spirit Vale, a town dedicated to communing with the dead. Jane herself is agnostic on the question - while she's definitely seen instances of her mother's trickery, she also has seen moments that she's not sure how else to explain.

Since a terrifying encounter during an earthquake when she was young, Jane has been fascinated with the life and inventions of Nikola Tesla. It's only show more natural, then, that when she has a chance to enter a journalism competition, she travels to New York to ask him for an interview. And this is the very trip that sets things in motion - Jane encounters Nikola's handsome assistant, Thad, and her sister Mimi meets Benjamin Guggenheim's mistress Ninette who invites Mimi to travel with them, and who is eventually responsible (at least in part) for the family's trip on the ill-fated Titanic. Because, of course, we have to end up on the Titanic - it's in the subtitle, it's on the cover, and it's foretold!

For a novel billed as being about the Titanic (including several references and foreboding prophecies), we barely spend time aboard, and we spend even less time with the sinking due to a bit of a weird plot twist that didn't seem to fit with the rest of the story for me. This was most disappointing because I was interested in several of the themes of the novel (classism which cuts both ways, race, science vs. spiritualism) - some of which I found new and unusual based on my reading about the disaster thus far (though I grew weary of Gilded Age Celebrity Name-dropping - the Astors, the Guggenheims, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, not to mention Tesla), and which I would have enjoyed seeing play out during the course of the disaster.

Given that Thad is pretty convinced that anyone who has money can only be a selfish jerk (Thad, you are NOT a bad person if you would like to have a lobster dinner, drink champagne and sleep in an incredibly fancy hotel room for once and BOOK it would have been nice to challenge him on this), I would have thought that the sinking of the Titanic, with the steerage passengers kept locked below while the ship filled with water and half-empty lifeboats being sent off so there was no class-mixing, would have been a great way to drive this point home - but class differentiation is only lightly touched upon and we spend next to no time dealing with the consequences of the iceberg due to the aforementioned odd plot twist.

Another theme that is raised, but promptly relegated to the background, is the issue of race, especially in Gilded Age America. A significant character turns out to be of Haitian descent - though the character's light skin allows this heritage to remain hidden unless revealed. The character struggles with a sense of identity and whether there is a need for deception in some scenes, but for all this spends most of the book passing as Caucasian and therefore avoiding any problems which made me wonder that the author included this plot thread (which I would have liked to see explored in more depth)at all.

Ultimately, though, I was most disappointed by the cop-out (in this reader's opinion) of not actually having anyone experience the horrors of the shipwreck. There is barely a mention of all those trapped in steerage. And there is little discussion of the bodies in the water, the ridiculously empty lifeboats or the trauma of survivors' guilt. I know that some may consider these aspects "done to death", but it seems to me a novel billed as about the Titanic that simply glosses over all of these points is doing the inherent drama of the setting a disservice.

More at A Hoyden's Look at Literature. show less

It is rare that I give a completely negative review. However, it is also rare that I read a book as bad as this one. I think it deserves to be talked about as it illustrates many of the Do Nots that I try to avoid in my own writing. I am also helping a young student edit her book for an independent project. The same mistakes I see in her manuscript I see in spades in this book.

To give you an idea of the absolutely insane plot:

Set in the 17th century, Weyn takes us from England where we meet show more our protagonist, Elsabeth, who can read minds, to America so she can try to read the minds of the “animalcules” (cells) the inventor of the microscope had just discovered (why they need to go to the Americas is never fully revealed). Their ship crashes in the Bermuda triangle and she floats in a barrel to an island where she meets a slave and falls in love with him. She lives with the slaves where she is taught magic by a formidable African woman until the owners get back and find her and ship her as an indentured servant to Massachusetts. She brings an evil with her from the Bermuda triangle and that causes the witch trials. She saves the day by astral projecting with her governess and by the prayer of her catholic friend who calls on Teresa of Avila to come help as well as a native shaman. It tidily wraps up by having a native Indian come and ask her and her slave love and her catholic friend and weary governess to go live with them.

Yep. I am reeling by the badness.

Besides the ridiculous plot, the writing was terrible. The author uses dialogue for amazingly long and complex info dumps about history. They are totally inappropriate and out of the blue. It gives me the feeling of one of those failed educational videos or textbooks where they have cartoon characters that “talk” to each other about the subject. For example, this is one of the first conversations she has with the slave boy who finds her washed up on the island. Keep in mind: 17th century. White girl. Black boy. Washed up desert island. First meeting.

“You speak English. Where am I?” I asked.

“Of course I speak English. Back in Africa — before I came here — I worked for the Richards and George company. They export palm oil from Africa. My father and I were employed by them since I was a buhbuh.”

“A what?”

“A little boy.”

“I speak English and I have never heard the word buhbuh,” I said. “Is it more Gullah?”

“Yes.”

“What is Gullah?”

“It’s what we speak here. Some words are English; others are from my home in Africa, Sierra Leone, and other nearby places and tribes.”

Oh thank you, nice African slave boy, for explaining the historical reasons and cultural significance of the language I speak in such a textbook fashion.

The behaviour of the characters does not fit the time period as well. It is like the historical setting has been tacked on to a modern day character like a dress on a paper doll (or breasts on a Michelangelo sculpture). There is hardly any detail about the time period- what they wore, what they ate, the social moors of the time. Not to mention the fact that Weyn tries to cram too many different aspects of that society into a slim novel. The witch trials in Massachusetts. Anton van Leeuwenhoek and the microscope. The slave trade in the Carribbean. Tacked on to this a magical plot with demons and angels. The book read like a fifth grade composition: And then the ship sinks. And then I was sold to Reverend Parris. And then… and then the nice Native Indian came and we talked as equals and we all went off into the sunset and lived happily after.

Finally, though the novel begins with van Leeuwenhoek and the interesting concept of being able to read the minds of cells (called animalcules in the book) this thread is completely dropped. We hear nothing more about it.

After reading this book, I googled the author to see if she was indeed a teenager herself. Perhaps this was a first attempt and I was being too harsh. But no. It turns out she is the author of the Barcode tattoo, a popular science-fiction novel among teens and one that has peaked my interest. She is a veteran writer and as such should know better.

I give it one star because my daughter liked it (that is why I read it). This book must have had something in it that appealed to her. And when I was retrieving the image from amazon, I noticed that booklist gave it a starred review and Kirkus as well, to my great mystification. It is definitely fast-paced and Weyn does cover a lot of ground.

So maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? Though YA literature is not synonymous with bad literature- there are way too many good YA novels that help disprove that myth, this book does not help the cause.

The sloppy writing, anachronistic characters, slapdash historical details and haphazard plot make me wonder how it ever got published in the first place, let alone garner good reviews. show less

In short: I had fun with Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters by Suzanne Weyn, but ultimately, I wanted a story with a little more substance.

Set sometime after the events of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters tells the story of, well, Dr. Frankenstein's orphaned twin daughters, Giselle and Ingrid. The girls - complete opposites in personality - inherit Castle Frankenstein on a remote island in Scotland. Beautiful and shallow Giselle takes on life as the new Baroness of the show more castle while intelligent and ambitious Ingrid takes up in her father's footsteps in performing secret experiments. Life is not so great, however, as the girls are soon plagued by the news of mysterious murders in the area. I had fun with Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters for the most part, despite a few quibbles. I particularly loved the historical cameo appearances - the most notable of which was Mary Shelley, naturally. That was pretty clever.

Chapters alternate between Giselle and Ingrid's point of view, told in diary format. The diary-style story device was probably my main criticism of Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters. There were often lengthy scenes of dialogue included in their diary entries and that seemed odd for someone who is supposedly recording their thoughts of events after the fact. The entries just didn't sound like someone writing in their diary. There was really no purpose for this particular story device and the author, Suzanne Weyn, could have easily written the story without it and accomplished the same thing.

I was also a little disappointed because Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters wasn't what I expected it to be, though I realize that's a bit unfair. I had been expecting Frankenstein's Monster to be a major part of the story and make many appearances, but he only does once in a flashback. I was hoping for more of a scary gothic horror vibe, like in the original Frankenstein, but instead the story seemed geared more towards a younger age group, specifically younger girls. Ultimately, I prefer books with a little more substance, but I would recommend Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters to gothic horror fans of a younger age group. show less