Weinberg’s clever, surprising riff on and corrective to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol launches from a fruitful question: “How could God let Scrooge be redeemed, while Marley wandered forever, wrapped in chains?” The answer, when it eventually comes, involves love. Also: the transmutation of life into fiction and fiction back into life, achieved through magic, the theater, ghosts, the life of Charles Dickens, and God herself—who looks like a blonde Tina Fey. Also crucial are the machinations of witches of both the 19th and 21st centuries, one of whom treats her lover, an unknowing real-life Scrooge, to a sorcerous vasectomy. For all its wild inventions, at this novel’s heart is a portrait of a contemporary playwright, whose work brings her not just a Tony at age 25 but the attention of someone she never could have expected: the ghost of the actual Marley, the man whom Dickens—in, as Weinberg imagines it, a fit of pique and divine inspiration—immortalized as Scrooge’s partner in the Carol.

The book is wild, comic, sexually frank, restlessly inventive. The narrative vaults over centuries and lives, between mortal and ghostly realms, its best scenes established with quick telling details, about contemporary theater or the gentlemen’s clubs of Victorian London. Like Dickens’s classic, Scrooge’s Folly opens in the real world, introducing the fantastical to reveal human capacity for charity and redemption.

This is appealing material often undercut by inconsistent scenecraft. Early chapters centered on the development of playwright Andrea Smilow have the feeling of a script treatment rather than fully dramatized fiction, with crucial events passing in a blink, a tendency that continues throughout. Andrea’s compelling, as is her friend Beth, the strongest witch in contemporary North America, though what precisely such a distinction means Weinberg leaves to readers. Andrea’s present connects to the pasts of the (real-life!) Scrooge and Marley in gratifyingly surprising ways, and the project, in the second half, of finding redemption for Marley and romance for all is wholly original, building to a happy ending and bursts of comedy and insight.

Takeaway: A bold, playful riff on Dickens’s classic, bursting with ghosts and ideas.

Great for fans of: Jon Clinch’s Marley: A Novel, Samantha Silva’s Mr. Dickens and His Carol.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: B+
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A-