Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors Review: A Glittering, Uneven Debut About a Doomed Marriage

Coco Mellors' debut novel is a sharp-edged, imperfect portrait of a marriage that was never built to last — and it knows it.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein opens on New Year's Eve in Manhattan, 2007, when Frank — an award-winning advertising executive with a worsening drinking problem — meets Cleo, a beautiful, blond, aspiring British painter twenty years his junior, in an elevator ninety minutes before midnight. Their charged first conversation leads to dinner and flirtation, and the novel's next scene jumps directly to their wedding day, six months later. As the Los Angeles Times observes, this temporal leap is a deliberate formal choice: Mellors renders courtship as a heedless blur, letting the details of the relationship come into focus only once the marriage has already set — or, as the Times puts it, "curdled." The wedding reception then unfurls as an extended party scene that populates the novel with its ensemble of supporting characters, each arriving with their own origin stories and struggling creative ambitions.

At the novel's heart is the slow disintegration of Frank and Cleo's union. According to Publishers Weekly, resentment, carelessness, infidelity, and childhood wounds erode the marriage from within: Frank's mother was an emotionally distant alcoholic, and Cleo's died by suicide. Yet their intoxicating chemistry keeps them together even as the damage accumulates. Cleaver Magazine notes that Mellors "bravely tells the story of a marriage that never shies away from the uncomfortable," tackling hard subjects without deflection. The novel is structured around this tension between glamour and destruction — Barnes & Noble describes it as "a glittering, funny and relatable debut about being young (and not so young) and trying to make sense of it all in New York City," centering on the marriage and the people caught in its orbit.

Mellors frames the novel as, in part, a satirical portrait of Downtown Manhattan life, and the Los Angeles Times describes hers as "a city of flash and fluttering movement, as if deliberately designed to distract its inhabitants from seeing that, beneath the surface, there's no there there." The supporting cast skews toward the creative class: younger characters struggling to find themselves, older ones who have found the profitable intersection of art and commerce, and nearly everyone sheltered — however precariously — by trust funds, inheritances, or a shabby-chic lifestyle. Publishers Weekly notes that some of this satirical texture lands well; one of Cleo's friends archly dismisses a man for keeping shoe trees in his sneakers "like a psychopath." The Los Angeles Times also observes that many characters carry ethnicities and origin stories that do too much of the work of explaining who they are — a structural tendency that flattens rather than deepens.

Publishers Weekly, while finding the novel "involving," identifies a real weakness in the supporting ensemble: too often, it reads like caricature. Frank's younger half-sister Zoe attends a "Climaxing to Consciousness" workshop; Santiago, a Peruvian chef, voices his outsider status in dialogue that tips toward self-conscious type. The notable exception, Publishers Weekly argues, is Eleanor — a screenwriter who takes a freelance job at Frank's firm and develops a flirtation with him. Her sections, the review states, achieve the blend of wit, pathos, and romantic tension that the rest of the novel strives for but doesn't always reach. The overall tone and narrative intrigue, Publishers Weekly concludes, can feel scattered.

Readers drawn to intimate character studies of self-destructive relationships set against a vividly rendered urban backdrop will find much to engage with here. The Los Angeles Times characterizes the novel as one "made for TV," a description that captures both its visual, scene-driven quality and its ensemble sensibility. The novel does not offer redemption arcs so much as honest reckoning — Mellors, as Cleaver Magazine puts it, is a writer who does not shy away from discomfort. For readers who want a debut that reaches ambitiously for social satire, romantic devastation, and psychological depth all at once, Cleopatra and Frankenstein delivers an uneven but genuinely compelling first outing.