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.

A bold, playful riff on Dicken’s classic, bursting with ghosts and ideas.

                                                                                                                                                                                                          BookLife – Publishers Weekly