Marly’s Ghost by David Levithan, illustrated by Brian Selznick: In this “remix” of Dickens’s classic Christmas Carol, teenaged Ben must cope with his girlfriend’s death by being visited by the spirits of love past, present, and future. The idea was clever, and it was fun picking out which characters were which from the original story, but the re-used dialogue was out of place, coming across as stilted and meaningless. If Levithan had either always had the characters speaking like Dickens or paraphrased the original lines, it would have been smoother. All the same, I enjoyed this short book, and the illustrations were nice.
Also posted on BookCrossing.