“He said, ‘Without stories, we’re all just lonely islands.
‘Stories let us see and hear and feel what someone else does,’ she explained. ‘They build bridges to the other islands. That’s why stories are so important. They create true empathy.'”
First off, let me start by saying that I love a Christmas Carol. This modern YA retelling is everything I wanted it to be. Holly Chase is a Scrooge and when the ghosts try to save her, they fail. The penalty for her unchanged ways is death and an assignment as one of the ghosts. There she needs to work each year to help other Scrooge’s see the error of their ways. She and the other ghosts analyze the potential Scrooge’s life for characters that mimic the ones from the original story (Marley, Fezziwig, Cratchit etc).
I thought the idea was a really ingenious way to bring a classic story into current relevance. Holly was a rich, selfish millennial who began to see the error of her ways as she starts to analyze another Scrooge’s behavior. When she falls for this Scrooge, she wants to save him more than herself and thus we have a story within a story.
I thought this was really well done and was exactly what I was hoping for when I chose my Christmas week reads.
What character from the Christmas Carol do you identify with the most?
~ Dana
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