This book DESTROYED me. Like, multiple crying breaks and a teary message to a friend afterwards. If maybe the extended pandemic has you in your romance feels, feeling like there's no one out there for you, this is the book for you.

Angelika Frankenstein is beautiful, smart, rich - and a little off-putting. She's opinionated, maybe a little self-centered, not always understood, and her brother's assistant in his attempts to raise the dead (the last one is, shockingly, not the main reason suitors keep turning her down). So, in a last-ditch effort to find love, she builds her dream man and brings him back to life. Except, of course, he's pretty certain he's got a life to return to. Angelika agrees to help him with his hunt, hoping it'll bring them closer together, but maybe it's herself who's going to be revealed in this adventure.

I could write a 5,000 word essay on this book. Angelika Frankenstein is the woefully misunderstood sister of a man who's obsessed with establishing a scientific name for himself, often on the back of Angelika's work. Her candidness is often misinterpreted as snobbiness, or worse, rudeness, and she ends up driving most people away from her. So, she tries to build herself a soulmate, and this person she designed to be her ideal match just wants to get away from her. Ow.

Will helps Angelika become the best version of herself, helps her to understand her privilege and how to communicate clearly without accidentally putting her foot in her mouth. Angelika loves him from the jump and is so fully <i>his</i>, but he doesn't want to be hers until he knows who he is - and no one has ever chosen to be Angelika's before.

This book is funny, tender, emotional, lonesome, and perfection. It's well worth all the emotions you're going to go through.

Thank you Avon and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

Angelika's parents died when she was young, death, pregnancy and wanting to become a mother when one cannot, amnesia, light religious trauma (lol), some blood but it's not gory