by Jim Piecuch

An interesting idea, which I've seen attempted once before with dubious results, but this one very quickly looked like it would shape up to be a worthwhile story. The pacing was a little slow at first, but soon began to pick up and I found myself being engaged by the characters.

There was an element of Romance, but that wasn't the main focus of the story. I liked the plot progression a lot despite the sometimes slow delivery and a fairly weak ending. The characters were very well defined and brought reader reactions, sometimes strong ones. Tim is a likable character. He's generous, charitable and everything you would expect him to be, based on where Dickens left his story.

There were a few things that made it glaringly apparent that the book was written by an American author; terms like 'washcloth' and 'Mom' and drinking coffee in a situation where a Victorian Englishman would be far more likely to have tea for example. Otherwise there weren't any huge problems, although a sudden pov change to Jane did stick out a little. Also the ideas of gift giving at Christmas were very modern and didn't reflect the actual customs of the Victorian English as you might expect from a History teacher, even one who specialises in American history.

Conversely, there were some smooth transitions into visions from Tim's childhood which were very well done, although one extensive flashback seemed to go on too long.

Overall I enjoyed reading it and feel my time was well spent. As Christmas stories go, this one is a nice, light read. You have to suspend disbelief on some things, like how long it takes to recover from a major operation before someone can be moved, but generally it kept my attention and has left me feeling that now I know what eventually happened to Tiny Tim.

by James Benmore

As sequels to Oliver Twist go, this one was pretty good. Benmore depicts the Artful Dodger in a sort of 'winning rogue' sort of way that makes him likeable and easy to sympathize with as he gets into one tight situation after another.

The premise is that Jack Dawkins, aka The Artful Dodger, has returned to England after criminal exile in Australia with a special dispensation from the governor, but the governor has his own reasons for sending Jack back. He is to track down a valuable stone, called the Jackapoor stone, accompanied by a native employee of the governor who is also an assassin.

The premise is reasonably believable, however, some of the elements of the plot are not. There were scenes that ranged from the doubtful, like Jack finding out so many years later that Fagin had been killed, to the highly unlikely like the current residents of his old derelict lodgings allowing a known thief and his quiet, black friend to have a night's lodgings out of Christian charity. Sorry but in Victorian England, suspicion of such a pair would be too high to invite them into your home for the night and the building in question would probably have been uninhabitable and torn down long since!

The icing on the cake of unbelievability though, was later in the book when Jack meets up with all his old friends, Fagin's boys. I guess the author missed the part of Oliver Twist at the end where all the boys died of drink. Still, the reformation of Charley Bates was handled very well so at least that consistency with the book was carried forward.

Despite these problems with the plot, the story was told well and I did enjoy it, though it got a little slow in the middle. There is a sequel to this sequel which suggests to me that it could become an ongoing series, but I have mixed feelings about it. Judging from the sample of Dodger of the Dials, it looks like it will be much the same in that the character is well depicted, but what he does goes in directions that don't ring true.

Overall I enjoyed the read, but felt like it could have been done better.

David Weston

After reading several samples of Artful Dodger books, I decided I liked the voice and writing on this one and bought it. I got quickly caught up and continued to enjoy it.

I did think the author tried too hard to work in recognized Dickens characters and associations and some of the dates and terms that don't fit the era or were too American (like washcloth, cracked jokes, etc.) don't quite add up, but I let these things slide because the story itself held my attention and I really enjoyed reading it.

The premise takes up where Oliver Twist left off, with Dodger getting shipped to Australia. His adventures aboard ship and after he reaches his destination are what you would expect from the character and the characterization is done well. Belief was strained a little with some of the characters who were also on board because as I said, they just didn't add up. One was from a different decade of the century, another was likely to spend a lot of time where she had last been seen in a mental hospital and the recovery was too miraculous to accept. This continued almost to the end where more familiar names turn up and the Theatre Royal in Sydney is being planned in 1832 when it actually opened in 1827, but nevermind. I think the story would have been better without shoehorning other Dickens characters in.

Other things that bothered me were the reference to half a year to make the voyage when prison ships typically took about 70 days and a failure to notice the complete change of season after crossing the Equator.

The new characters who were introduced were very well defined and were a big part of what kept the story so interesting. There were allies who garnered the reader's sympathy and enemies I really wanted to see get their comeuppance, and in the middle of it all the winsome little pickpocket lad who continues to fascinate both readers and writers well into the twenty-first century.

One of the themes of the story is about Dodger looking for his father in Australia. I felt this was handled well, especially with typical Dickensian coincidence giving him an essential lead!

There was an overlong sequence about the game Cricket that will have lost anyone not familiar with the game, and some who are. What puzzled me is that the author is English, yet he kept referring to a match as a game like an American. Whether he has lived in the USA for a lot of years or intentionally wrote in American English I don't know, but it definitely grated on me when reading on this subject.

Despite that, I really did enjoy the story. The ending was too abrupt and indicated a sequel, but apart from that, the loose ends did get tied up and the journey was worth the effort.

by Peter David

There seems to have been an explosion of stories about the Artful Dodger between 2010-2014. Some of them stay true to the characters and events depicted in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and others fall somewhat short of the mark, but this one is pure fantasy and clearly intends to be so.

The thing is, it's done fairly well. The writing starts out really good and the author's explanation in the introduction makes perfect sense; of course Fagin was a vampire all along! The facts fit all too convincingly. The story flows quickly and has some moments where I can clearly visualize a movie version with some great comedy moments, although it slows down in the middle.

Jack has some definite ideas of how a gentleman behaves. In this, the author has painted a charming character, though sometimes he doesn't ring quite true. The attempt to create a lower class English accent gave away the author's American origins. It got to where every time I saw "ya" I was being pulled out and grumbling about Americans who try to sound English and getting it wrong. There were a couple of other niggles, like alternating references to a dog as either a German Shepherd or a Mastiff, two very different breeds.

The plot takes a turn for the cliché vampire story, but that I can forgive as it is obviously the intent of the storyteller to go into the fantastical on this one. It is often predictable, but nevertheless well told and there is a great diatribe on right and wrong that fits into the story very well. The one thing that put me off was trying to convince me that vampires age. Vampires don't sparkle, they don't produce children, and they don't age!

Overall I enjoyed it, though the last few chapters really strained credulity even in a world with vampires, and although the author seems to have been aware of the events in Oliver Twist generally, his artistic licence with Charley Bates pushed my Dickens purism a little too far.

Not great literature, but an amusing read.

by Austin Crawley

I wasn't sure about this one at first because the three significant characters didn't immediately invoke sympathy, but as the story reflects the journey of Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, I could see why they had to be at least a little shallow, so that they had some room for development. I actually started to like Amber once we got a better look at her through her reactions to the ghost visitations.

The story is actually very cleverly deceptive, starting out like any group of middle class girls around college age, just having a laugh by doing a séance to raise fictional ghosts. Then when something actually results, we are taken through their individual memories and mostly normal fears into a very changed reality.

I don't want to give spoilers, but rest assured that things get deeper and more intense as the story goes along. There's a certain amount of a moralistic message, but that also follows the spirit of the source material and doesn't hit you over the head. The last of the ghost sequences was the sort of thing that leaves you thinking afterwards, about the whole nature of belief and how our perceptions of a thing shape its nature. That part just might stay with me for a long time.

I would highly recommend this as a Christmas Horror read. It's novella length, so easy to read in a short time just before the holiday, either as an alternative to or in conjunction with the well known Charles Dickens story or even watching a version of the story, even the Muppets version, on television.