Man Made Boy by Jon Skovron (review)

Okay, Boy isn’t quite your average teen—he’s a bit larger, and most of his body is stitched together from spare parts—but he’s still got problems like any seventeen-year-old kid. These problems include mustering up the courage to ask out his crush (who happens to be a troll), dealing with the expectations of his parents (who happen to be Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride), and feeling like an outcast in his own community (which happens to be a theatre troupe made up of fantastical creatures, currently residing in vast caverns underneath Times Square). Spooked when his folks mention sending him off to school in Sweden, Boy takes off on a cross-country road trip with a host of other similarly displaced creatures (including the granddaughters of Jekyll and Hyde), but he’s hunted by VI, a sentient computer virus designed by none other than Boy himself. Suffused with warmth and humor, this homage pokes fun more at the pop-culture tropes that have sprung up around Frankenstein than the actual classic work, with the digital version of a creation gone awry a particularly brilliant and contemporary twist. The plot is pieced together in episodic bits as Boy encounters different creatures at each pit stop, and both the various settings and the individual characters provide depth and complexity; the awe and wonder of the Southwestern desert, for example, is on full display here, while the painful loneliness of the Chupacabra, the last of its kind, is equally powerful. More comfortable behind the keyboard than in real life and wondering if he’ll ever fit in anywhere, Boy is a guy to whom plenty of teens will relate, and they’ll be pleased to discover that the big wide world has a place for just about everyone and every monster.