Through The Tempests Dark and Wild: A Story of Mary Shelley, Creator of Frankenstein by Sharon Darrow; 2003. Hardcover. (Ch-NF)

Haunting and deeply moving - a beautifully illustrated, fictionalized account of a formative time in the life of the teenage girl who wrote our most enduring horror story.Long before Mary Shelley published her Gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein, in 1818, at the age of nineteen, she shared fireside ghost tales at the home of family friends in Scotland. It was there that the headstrong girl - orphaned by her mother, spurned by her stepmother, and sent away by her father - spent two of her happiest teenage years. The brooding Scottish landscape and warm family atmosphere so influenced the author’s life and art that some believe her famous novel took root there. To illuminate this period in Mary Shelley’s life, Sharon Darrow skillfully spins fiction from fact. Her words are masterfully matched by Angela Barrett’s exquisite, atmospheric, authentically detailed illustrations. The result is a rich tapestry of stories within stories - those told, those written, and more extraordinary, those lived.