I absolutely loved The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch by Melinda Taub so you can imagine my glee when she wrote a second book, The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet. Even the fact that it was a library book and my dog chewed up the cover and I had to pay for it did not lessen my joy.

Here is the publisher’s summary of the plot:

Awkward, plain, and overlooked, Mary Bennet has long been out of favor not only with her own family but with generations of readers of Pride and Prejudice. But what was this peculiar girl really doing while her sisters were falling in love?

As, one by one, Mary’s sisters get married, she hatches a plan. If the world won’t give this fierce, lonely girl a place, she’ll carve one out herself. In a desperate bid to avoid becoming a burden on her family or, worse, married to a controlling man, Mary does what any bright, intrepid girl would do. She takes to the attic and teaches herself to reanimate the dead. If finding acceptance requires a husband, she’ll get one. . . even if she has to make him herself.

However, Mary’s genius and determination aren’t enough to control the malevolent force that she unwittingly unleashes. Soon, her attempts to rein in the destruction wreaked by her creations leads her to forge a perhaps unlikely friendship with another brilliant young woman unlike any she’s ever known. As that friendship blossoms into something passionate and all-consuming, Mary begins to realize that she may have to choose between the acceptance she’s always fought for and true happiness.

The story is told as a series of letters that Mary writes to a scientist named Herr Holzmann whom she has never met in person. She had initiated a correspondence with him under the name “Sir Gregory” and at the start of the novel she reveals her true identity and begs for Holzmann’s help. Although he does not immediately appear, she continues to write to him because he is the only person in whom she can possibly confide.

As she goes on to tell her story, she reveals a great deal about her own character (she is coded as being on the autism spectrum), her family dynamics, and her loneliness as the one person she knows who has an avid interest in science and a total lack of interest in society. Mary makes some truly atrocious choices, but because we are essentially in her head we always understand her reasoning.

I won’t spoil the things that occur except to say that you can picture every character as being in a different kind of book. Mary is in Frankenstein. Her test subject/mortal enemy/suitor Pike is in Wuthering Heights. Her friend Georgiana Darcy, who has a secret of her own, is in The Chronicles of Narnia. These are not stories that should mesh and they don’t, really, but it’s delightful to see them bang into each other, lending each other different strands of humor, queer romance, and horror.

I did not find this to be a light romp. I found Mary’s loneliness to be heartbreaking. I found Pike to be terrifying. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book – I was happily surprised at its depth. I enjoyed the complexity of Mary’s character as she grappled with ethical problems, not always successfully. She was not nice. Sometimes she was horrible. But she was consistently interesting, and, I think, always trying to do the right thing.

There is a romance, one I thought was lovely but underwritten. My biggest issue with it is that a fight that occurs late in the book is too easily and quickly resolved. I appreciated that there is a happy ending that is both truly happy and that is realistic for the time and place.

Ultimately, my favorite thing about this creative, imaginative, character-centered book was the way some people in Mary’s life saw something in her that they could connect to, and the way they reached out to her to help her feel less alone. She spends so much of her life desperately trying to mask and when she finally comes to accept herself, and to feel accepted by a special few, she is in turn able to reach out to others to help them.

This, more than romantic love specifically, is the core message of the book: “Pray look for other nettle-leaved bellflower people, and cling to them when you meet them, never minding the thorns.”