Book: The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge
Exclusive interview with author Charlie Lovett and a review of his novel about Ebenezer Scrooge, everyone’s favorite Christmas curmudgeon
Rating: 3 Stars
“It was Christmas time and we were studying Arthurian legends,” says The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge author Charlie Lovett. “I only had one student in my study hall at the end of the day, and he had a great sense of humor, so I started to, judiciously, introduce him to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The combination of Christmas and parody gave me the idea to try writing a parody of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”
The Further Adventures is a sequel to the original classic; revisiting the Scrooge backstory so his nephew’s generation will remember the meaning of Christmas is charming. The sequel may be too much like the original, with so many lines from original book. Where Lovett matches the pacing of Dickens, the story might have benefited from a more modern pace and faster start. True to the original, it’s the same level of scary and makes a nice addition as a holiday gift.
In The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Scrooge has changed. He’s not been a curmudgeon for years. Twenty years after Scrooge was visited by three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, he’s again visited by former partner Jacob Marley, who still has a few chains to remove before he can rest in peace.
“I actually wrote The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge almost eleven years ago,” says Lovett. “I was working as a long-term substitute for a seventh grade English teacher who was on maternity leave. I worked on it every day during study hall and then during Christmas vacation, which we spent in England. I even wrote as we sat in the pew at Canterbury Cathedral waiting for Christmas Eve services to start.”
Lovett completed the book in early 2005 and shortly thereafter got his first agent. “He sent it to a few publishers who passed on it for a variety of reasons,” says Lovett. “It wasn’t long before my excitement about finally having an agent was replaced with silence from New York.”
“Writing is a tough business,” says Lovett. “Although I had never been dropped by an agent before, I had been rejected plenty of times. I put Scrooge in the bottom drawer and went on to the next project. Ten years later, I was sitting in my editor’s office looking at cover designs for my second novel. I mentioned that I had a Christmas book, a sequel to A Christmas Carol…. Sometimes, success in publishing is all about patience.”
Lovett wrote the New York Times bestselling novel The Bookman’s Tale and the novel First Impressions. He’s written many books of non-fiction and several on Lewis Carroll. He has nineteen published children’s plays, performed in over 3500 productions in fifty states and twenty foreign countries.
Lovett is currently finishing his next novel, The Lost Manuscript. Set in an English cathedral library, the search is on for a missing medieval manuscript.
Lovett was born and still lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the son of an English professor and book collector. He and his wife spend five or six weeks a year in their cottage in Oxfordshire. His book tour for The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge begins in October, details on his website. www.charlielovett.com or find him on Twitter @charlielovett42
The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge by Charlie Lovett . Hardcover: 128 pages, Publisher: Viking (October 20, 2015), Language: English. ISBN: 9780525429104 $19.95
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