What a remarkable comic book! Once I picked it up, I couldn't set it down. Until I finished it.

Mirka is a young girl in Hereville, a town of Orthodox Jews. While the rest around her study and learn the skills they'll need in their adult lives, she dreams of fighting dragons. A chance discovery on the edge of town leads her to a strange house and a woman who keeps a pig and may be a witch! Mirka learns along the way that no knowledge is wasteful and sometimes a battle can be won without swords.

I've read at least two of Reynolds books (though I think I've read at least one other) and she's hit or miss with me. I didn't expect both to be true of one of her books!

I've wanted to read this book forever as the idea really intrigued me. the Bennett's situation was bad enough, but what if it got worse? The Collins are at Longbourne, the Bennett girls split up among relatives, and Jane is married to a shop keeper! Elizabeth is living with the Gardiners, helping her aunt with the children. A chance encounter with Bingley brings the cast of characters together again.

Awesome premise and the obvious research into the time period added a great deal of social, historical, and even economical aspects that were wonderful to read. The characters were recognizable and mostly themselves (see below for exceptions), though obvious changed slightly by the circumstances of the 'What If' scenario. There were touching moments, hilarious ones, and painful ones.

I really wanted to like this book.

But man, it thwarted me at every turn!

Initial reactions:

Review:

I literally have no idea how to review this book. Even after talking LL's ear off about it, I'm still not sure how much I like and how much I hate this book.

First let me say, this was well written.

A short but informative performance by Simon Callow, with the script written by Peter Ackroyd. While I may have had my issues with Ackroyd in Albion, what he created here was an amazing look - brief but in depth - at a famous figure in English Literature. The bones might be his but Callow makes this performance.

This is a BBC radio production that appears to tie into the one man play, parts of which I've seen before and greatly enjoyed. He walks through the author's life and calls him and his characters forth with quotes from letters and his books.

When this says preformed, it means it. Patrick Stewart does an amazing - of course - job of bringing the various characters together, particularly Scrooge. Turns out this was made after the movie, which is also quite good. Though Richard E. Grant, no mater how good an actor I think he is, is way to tall to play Cratchit. It sadly would have been almost impossible for the man to have reached such a great height with the likely dietary issues he would have faced. One of things the Jim Carey animated version got very right.

Stewart doesn't just read the story, he laughs, cries, and more, bringing Dicken's already descriptive text to life. There are a few places where I think they used the later edition rather then the original text - and turns out it's abridged - but mostly it's the story I've heard and seems so many times before. But he makes it his own, something often hard to do as this story has been done by so many. I know this has long been a favorite of my dad's, and my own.