Frankissstein: A Love Story

This wasn't a difficult read. I like Winterson's writing style, though I also get people scoffing at it being very ~literary~ with the lack of quotation marks and whatnot.
I really enjoyed the stuff from Mary Shelley's point of view. Her talking about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be alive while living the horror of continually losing her children in infancy - she lost three before her fourth child survived.

The modern stuff I wanted to like, I'm interested in the idea of living past our lifetimes, life extension and brain uploads etc., but the characters were weirdly one dimensional. The sexbot seller, the southern black woman leveraging sexbots for God, they didn't really do anything for me at all. Ry, the protagonist, is an interesting character. I like how they talk about gender, and they feel to me like a representation of some of the more fluid gender presentations and genderqueer identities. Unfortunately everyone else in the story treats them like a freak and doesn't respect their name and there's an awful sexual assault scene later on so whatever Ry is supposed to represent, the future of gender or the success of body modification technology or how we'll all be able to feel more comfortable with a more fluid idea of what a body can be (or the idea of not having a body at all!), the world is not at all ready for this. Ry is not allowed to be. Ry, whose last name is Shelley, is the future counterpart of Mary Shelley, who is also not allowed to be because of her gender. It's the other counterparts that don't track for me. Ron Lord, the sexbot seller and presumably the Lord Byron counterpart, kind of just feels like a juvenile dig at Byron to me? And Victor Stein, for all his talk of brain scanning and moving past our bodies, is adamant that Ry's genitals make him NOT GAY despite Ry's presentation and identity. He thinks that freeing us of our bodies will free our minds but he can't even conceive of a sexual orientation outside of STRAIGHT and GAY.

I'm not sure how much of my critiques are of the characters and how much are of the author. I can't tell what is supposed to be satire and what we're supposed to agree with. It's making me think I guess, but I don't love this kind of ambiguity when it comes to transphobia. I hope it was meant to make me uncomfortable.