If I hadn’t been reading this for book club, I would have DNFd it in the first 20 pages. But, I was reading it for book club, so I had to finish it. This was just not my jam. I went into it expecting to get a Frankenstein retelling, which it might have been but if it was, it was only a loosely inspired retelling (honestly, it’s been too long since I’ve read Frankenstein to draw any meaningful connections). It felt more like a slice-of-life historical fiction about a time of great upheaval in Baghdad’s history and the monster felt like it was supposed to be a metaphor for Baghdad itself, but I don’t know enough (read: nothing) about Baghdad’s history to determine if that’s accurate or not. Also, there were too many POVs and I didn’t really care about any of them except the monster and Elshiva. Also, I was disappointed there wasn’t cannibalism like the blurb led me to think there might be. The writing and translation were good though.