#OctoberThrills Can I not gain useful information from such encounters? - Amber Shackles 👀

Pip and Estella - The Beige review (posted to Amazon and Goodreads with a 5 star review) I bought this book out of spite, after watching its author get piled on online. That's a terrible reason to buy a book, and a very Dickensian one. The hardcover was worth it. For more than a century and a half, Estella has been described, analyzed, pined over and blamed by the man telling the story. She never got to answer. In Pip and Estella, C.J. Simone hands her the microphone, and she uses every word of it. The book retells Great Expectations in two alternating voices: Pip's, which stays close to Dickens, and Estella's, which is new. You get the same scenes from two chairs, and the two accounts don't match. He's sure she despises him. She's quietly filing reports on him like a Victorian talent scout. He thinks Satis House is a tomb. She thinks it's the most exciting afternoon she's had in years. Both of them are lying, mostly to themselves. That gap is where the book lives, and it's often wickedly funny. WHAT WORKS The dual voice isn't a gimmick. It's a right of reply, and it changes how familiar scenes land, from the card table to the snow in the garden to the cruelty Estella has been trained into and what it costs her. Estella herself. Simone takes her to Paris, into a finishing-school world with its own mean girls, and gives her a memory she didn't know she kept. If you've spent any time near adoption, certain pages will hit you in the chest. Her central question, whether people are born or made, is handled with real care. Respect for the source. Joe is still the heart of the book. Herbert Pocket is still the most gracious loser in English literature. The humour Dickens is loved for survives, and Simone adds her own. Commitment. Dickens wrote two endings and hedged. Simone picks one and commits. WHAT DOESN'T, QUITE The Pip chapters stay so close to the original that Dickens fans will catch themselves mouthing along. The Estella chapters are shorter than his, and I wanted more of them every time. We get into Estella's heart earlier than some readers will want, because mystery was her armour and Simone loosens a buckle early. The ending is tidier than Dickens would have dared. Purists will grumble. I didn't. ON RETELLINGS Some people say a retelling is the easy option. It isn't. A standalone author plays on her own field, and nobody has film on her. A retelling plays against an opponent with 160 years of tape, in front of a crowd that already knows the playbook and is waiting for the fumble. You have to hit every mark the master hit, then find the gap he missed and run through it in a voice he never gave her. Shakespeare borrowed almost every plot he staged, and nobody sent him back to write something original. Dickens himself rewrote his own ending when a friend called it too bleak. As Joe would say: "Lies is lies." A NOTE FROM THE CAKE TABLE Dickens already wrote about the people who circle a woman's work waiting for their slice. Miss Havisham points her cane at the rotting wedding cake and tells her relatives, "Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me." They send anonymous letters dressed up as concern. When the will is read, they get a few pounds each. Simone keeps Herbert's father's line, and I'll leave it here for anyone who needs it: "No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself." And Jaggers has the last word for readers deciding whether to pick this up: "Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence." The evidence is the book. Read it. Miss Havisham stopped every clock at twenty to nine. Simone started them again.