Great Expectations Fulfilled

Charles Dickens' classic novel is the best book he wrote. The main character Pip is the son of a working-class family who forgets his roots in his attempt to become successful - and when he falls in love with Estella - the "rich" girl the jilted Miss Havisham has trained to break men's hearts.

Dickens' plot takes many a twist and Dickens leads us to make many assumptions along the way about who is doing what and who is whose friend and whose enemy. To tell you how each one of these turns out would be to spoil the plot for you and to wreck the story. Suffice it to say that Dickens has quite a few surprises in store for Pip and the other wonderful characters - Estella, Miss Havisham, the hard-working likeable Jo(who loves to read, though his reading consists of just finding the word " JO" on the page), and Magwitch - whose role in the story takes more twists and turns than San Francisco's Lombard street.

Dickens' ending here is famous(some say infamous) in literary circles because he wrote the ending twice - and the ending he eventually leaves us with is said to NOT be his first choice - of course, the ending can be taken in at least two different ways as well.

Dickens gives us his usual colorful characters, a few lessons in what happens when you assume, and takes us on a twisted journey with wonderful sub-plots and sub-sub plots as well.

A wonderful book - it is the book I would recommend to introduce the teen reader to the classics(I am a literature teacher at a university and a past middle school teacher).