Oliver Twist - Young Reading Series 3 Gift Book | Classic English Literature for Kids | Perfect for Bedtime Stories & Classroom Reading

Or are Quentin Tarantino films all like "Oliver Twist"?I digress.Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens was written/published in 1840, meaning that the work is over 170 years old. Although it is written about then-modern people doing Victorian things, the morals and themes present in this common work of literature are still relevant today. This was literary superstar Charles Dickens first novel ever. And it shows. But regardless of how simplistic or frank the novel gets, what it does correctly, it does better than most modern authors.Oliver Twist is centered around the titular orphan, and the various adventures he has through the slums of and around London during the Victorian Era. In one sense, this is an adventure novel, about a young boy who gets wrapped up in a conspiracy much larger than he is. In another, it is a prime example of a detective novel, with investigations and interviews and searches for evidence to discover the secrets behind said consipiracy. But, in my opinion, it is most like the extreme characters and innapropriate humor most commonly found in movies such as Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill: Volume 1.Readers with more classic taste than my own may feel the need to scoff or drop their mouths in shock at this point in the review, but let me finish. The aforementioned cinematic masterpieces are both written by Quentin Tarantino, who has a fierce sense of zany and quirky. There has been a lot of literature along this line, but almost always in different genres: Kurt Vonnegut of Sci-Fi fame, for example. But they are all categorized by this extremely campy feel to them.Oliver Twist is a hard book to like if you're expecting airtight writing that gets to the point and tells a dramatic story effectively with good plotting. This is Dickens, not Hemingway. When a character gasps in horror of an event, Dickens would write " So and So gasped in horror, their mouth drooping along angular planes of shock and awe" or something along those lines. Characters are basically either good or bad, and don't tend to change too much (with a few exceptions--we'll get there soon). Bill Sikes, who is introduced as the Homebreaker, is a jerk throughout the whole novel, Oliver Twist is always the shinging bastion of morality. Fagin, for the most part, is always "the evil Jew" and is often characterized as the Devil. The Maylies are sickly sweetening as well. It's all black or white.Similarly, a ton of the plot points are quite contrived and a little too coincidental for modern reader's taste. Early on, Oliver, the Artful Dodger, and another little boy pickpocket a rich man named Mr. Brownlow while in a crowded square on the street. Of ALL the people they COULD have pick-pocketed, how do they choose the ONE man who is so deeply wrapped up in Olver's past? See what I mean?But in spite of all this extremity, sublimating the overwritten humor, and ignoring all the stupid things characters/the narrator say (" Alas! Poor Dick was dead!"-- we make fun of this all the time in my AP Literature class), this novel still manages to shine with a fierce backbone of humanity. Underneath all of the campy and lame emotional antics and plot points is the character of Nancy, who is perhaps the most underrated female character in all of Victorian Literature.What makes Nancy so special? Well, excluding one chapter at the end of the book for Fagin, Nancy is the *only* character in this entire novel who is true-to-life. We're talking living, breathing. Scratch what I said earlier about underrated "female" character. Nancy is one of the best characters to walk through the pages of all literature.Her conflict is real, her dialogue is real, her actions are real. And *her* character's climax is *the* climax of the novel. Without her, this book would be cheap trash.But the question then arises: if Dickens was capable of writing a character as powerful as Nancy is, why do all the other characters seem so cardboard and amateurish?This is Dickens, king of classic literature, we're talking about here. Each and every lame thing in this book is in this book for a reason (or at least, most of them, because I do admit Victorian people had different tastes then ourselves). Each stupid quibble of morality on Oliver's part is inserted into the text on purpose to provide contrast for Nancy's character. Among this crazy world with characters that seem like college freshmen overacting each of their lines, Nancy stands out like a fluorescent colored light house on the rocks. And coming from someone who would go on to write A Tale of Two Cities, the only logical explanation is that it was on purpose.And therein lies the true extent of Dickens' genius. He was intentionally inserting themes and symbolism and making things downright unreadable at times before it was cool to do so ( I wish it had stayed that way... Not a Joyce fan myself). The end product of this book is fantastic, and the ride to get there is just as exciting.So, if you're here because you were assigned to read this for school, be not alarmed. Change your mindset about the whole book, and look at it with Nancy as the main character. I guarantee, you'll love it.