Oliver Twist

Somewhere closer to 3.5 than 4 stars.

It chugged along rather nicely at first, although I didn't like to picture the beatings and starvation too clearly. Certain characters, such as Mr. Bumble in his pomposity, were much more interesting to imagine than pathetic Oliver taking punches. However, once we came to Chapter 15 I almost tossed the book aside because I was so sad and frustrated with what happened. Almost, but I didn't.

I stuck with it through the hard bits, ones that justified the creation of a new adjective to describe the squalor and misery in Mr. Dicken's books, and came out into the sunshine of the happy ending that I knew would be waiting for me, complete with all loose ends tied up and all the villains getting their just rewards. The only real surprise was the murder of Nancy, which I didn't think for a second was going to happen. It wasn't until the final sentence of the chapter, where Bill takes a heavy club and strikes her down, and is named a murderer, that I believed it. Up through the very sentence before that I thought there was going to be a way out for her, or that he would go to the edge of death but not over. Frankly, I didn't think Dickens had it in him to kill off a woman like that. It sounds perverse that this violent death made the book, but it's true. Without Nancy's murder it's a collection of predictable cliches molded around a mildly entertaining plot; with her murder we are reminded that shock and surprise exist, even in a Dickens book.