RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe success of Frankenstein in Baghdad is that, amid its unbelievable landscape—contemporary Baghdad—the presence of a sewn-together zombie seems hardly implausible ... the dystopian elements of the novel are not rooted in its speculative, supernatural elements but rather in the very real, nightmarish violence of 2005 Baghdad ... Frankenstein in Baghdad isn’t speculative doomsday porn that offers cathartic release; it’s a confrontation with despair that, in its use of comedy, refuses to be what Jill Lepore called in The New Yorker a \'fiction of submission.\' Frankenstein in Baghdad recognizes truths about the present day it describes instead of allowing a means for readers to escape and take solace in the comfortable idea that these books are only projections into an unreal future ... Saadawi has sutured together a dystopian universe that confronts the horrors of reality, rather than offering an escape from it and, in doing so, has provided American science fiction lovers—readers and writers alike—a new and refreshing template for dystopian fiction fitting to our time.
