About this item
It's aliiiiiiiive! New York Times bestselling authors of My Lady Jane are back with the electric, poetic, and (almost) historical tale of the one and only Mary Shelley.Mary may have inherited the brilliant mind of her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but she lives a drab life above her father's bookstore, waiting for an extraordinary idea that'll inspire a work worthy of her parentage - and impress her rakishly handsome (and super-secret) beau, Percy Shelley.Ada Lovelace knows a thing or two about superstar parents, what with her dad being Lord Byron, the most famous poet on Earth. But her passions lie far beyond the arts - in mechanical engineering, to be exact. Alas, no matter how precise Ada's calculations, there's always a man willing to claim her ingenious ideas as his own.
About the Author
Cynthia Hand grew up in southeast Idaho, just outside the town of Idaho Falls. From as far back as she can remember, she loved books and reading, and wrote her first short story (about a fairy being born in a tulip) when she was around six years old - pretty much as soon as she could write. Her second grade teacher, Mrs. Widdison, told Cynthia that she'd be an author some day, and Cynthia believed her. She kept writing stories all through grade school, most of them wildly fantastical musings on supernatural beings or creatures, none of which ever won the annual short story competition where the writer got to meet Kenneth Thomasma,the author of one of Cynthia's favorite books, Naya Nuki. Cynthia learned early on that if you wanted to win the writing contest, you should write stories about that time your parents got their car stuck in the snow on the side of a mountain just before dark. You should not write about a group of unicorns fighting to take over an island from an alien invasion. Cynthia kept writing about unicorns anyway.In middle school and high school, she and her friends formed a writing group that wrote fan fiction about their favorite novels and movies. Each person in the group invented a new character in the decided-upon world (they wrote about Elfquest, Vampire Hunter D, X-Men, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series, Anne McCafferty's Pern series, Star Wars, and SeaQuest (anyone remember SeaQuest? ) and wrote exclusively from that character's point of view, sharing their writing as they went, collectively shaping what happened to these characters. Early on Cynthia was appointed the "editor" of their work, meaning that she collected it all, typed it, and edited it. She loved and possibly abused her power with the red pen. In middle school and high school Cynthia also, on top of all the fan-fic writing, took piano lessons, danced tap and ballet, raced on the Kelly Canyon ski team, acted or teched in every school play and several plays for the community theater, sang in the school choir, took AP classes, and somehow managed to find time to eat and sleep enough to stay alive. There was a period during her junior year when she arrived at school at 5:30 a.m. and didn't get home until around 10 p.m., five days a week. She took the words insanely busy to a whole new level. Cynthia went to college at the College of Idaho, where she majored in English (because she still loved to read, dangit) with a pre-law emphasis. She kept writing, as a hobby, she told everybody (especially her dad, who wanted her to have a solid, well-paying job) but focused on classes in constitutional law and international politics. She kept this up until the beginning of her senior year, when one day, neck deep in the law section of the library, she had this thought: I don't want to be a lawyer. I want to be a writer. So she broke the news to her parents and her advisers, who were all dismayed but tried to be understanding (
