***** - Excellent
**** - Good
*** - Okay
** - Bad
* - Terrible
+ - Half-star
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+
DESCRIPTION: In all of England, no man is as cold-hearted and miserly as Ebenezer Scrooge. Cynical, friendless, abusive of his good-hearted clerk, he broods on his
fortunes like a latter-day dragon. Not even the bells of Christmas can soften his heart of ice... until the night he receives an unwelcome visit from an old business partner -
a man who died seven years ago. Bob Marley was cut of the same selfish, greedy cloth as Scrooge - and, it seems, the latter may share the former's eternal torment in the
afterlife. Ebenezer's only chance at salvation lies with three ghostly visitors, who seek to teach him the errors of his ways and the true meaning of Christmas.
REVIEW: Not a holiday season passes without half a hundred remakes, homages, and other blatant knock-offs of Dickens's original tale, so I figured I ought to try
reading the original. Though somewhat wordy (as one might expect of an author for whom verbosity was money), it holds up reasonably well today. No real reason is given for
Scrooge's youthful turn from generosity to selfishness - and, given how many decades of his life he has dedicated to cultivating such miserly tendencies, he reverts to a
feeling and caring human being a little too easily. Since it's basically a dressed-up fable, though, I don't suppose I ought to be too critical. (Fable or not, though, Tiny
Tim makes a tooth-rottingly saccharine plot device.)While a little sappy for my personal tastes, I can certainly see why tale this remains a holiday classic.
You might also enjoy:
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The Ghost Witch (Betty Ren Wright, YA Fiction - A girl finds that her new home is haunted by a witch)
An American Christmas Carol
(1979 movie DVD, starring Henry Winkler and moving the setting to Depression-era America)
Scrooged
(1988 movie DVD, starring Bill Murray as a heartless TV executive in need of a triple helping of the Christmas spirit)
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