Your assumption might be the case for frankenstein, it’s a relatively short book.
The parent is most likely talking about books like the count of monte cristo. It goes on for more than a thousand pages, but was originally serialised over a couple years.
Similar things happen to older books. Current day editions of don quixote include don quixote part 2, which was a sequel published a decade after the first.
The Wikipedia entry has a pronunciation guide:
English: [bɑːrsəˈloʊnə]
Catalan: [bəɾsəˈlonə]
The first a is a schwa and the o isn’t rounded. Honestly, it looks quite similar to English, to the point where there might be some English dialect that sounds exactly like that.