Review by Shwetha H S
Genre: Fiction
Imprint: Tate Publishing and Enterprises, LLC, USA
ISBN: 9781682543054
Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge by Norman Whaler is a sequel many years into the future from the time in which A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is set.
The storyline of Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge is sustained mainly by the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge. If you have read A Christmas Carol, then you would know that Tiny Tim is the character that melts the cold heart of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge. In the sequel that we are discussing, Tiny Tim is a grown man, who is still unmarried in the memories of the love he has for a woman who was married off to someone else because Tim didn’t have much wealth. Tim is a depressed young man. Just like the three ghosts appeared to Scrooge on the eve of Christmas to make him a better man, Scrooge’s ghost appears to Tim on the eve of a Christmas, but not to make him a better man because Tim is already a kind-hearted man, but ill-tempered. Then why does Scrooge’s ghost appear to him? Read the story to know, or not. I will tell you why.
If there was a need to write a sequel, the storyline adapted is definitely not the best as there is no story in there. Not wanting to sound cruel or rude, but the writer of this sequel probably wrote this as a tribute to his late wife. Yes, he does mention her in the dedication and in the About the Authors section. It also might be a dedication to his father who went by the same name as the author himself. Wife, the lost love, and the father as Scrooge. I am just guessing. But there are irrelevant double and single quotation marks combinations making reading a struggle. Though the story has already taken place, the narration fluctuates between past and present tenses. Also, the narrator doesn’t even mention Cratchit’s other children i.e. Tim’s siblings, not even once.
I enjoyed reading A Christmas Carol, but not Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge. I read both the books as an adult, liking one and not the other. I would not recommend this book even for a one-time read.
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