Great Expectations

Rating:
Summary: An Inspiring Classic
Review: I have always been an avid reader, always in search for a book that would enlighten and ispire me. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens fulfilled this. It is a compelling story about a young man who through a series of circumstances meets a beautiful yet cold hearted girl named Estella. The book follows him through his adolence an adult years. To me this book still hold very true today. It tells about love and how time may not heal all wounds. And also about how some people are manipulated, as Estalla was, into living out others lives.

Rating:
Summary: great expectations
Review: Great expectations is a very good book. It has action and a meaning. The book starts off by pip, which is a young orphan boy, going to a graveyard to look at his parent's tombstone. Then a escape convict grabs pip and tells him to bring him food and a file for his chains. The next day pip brings the man what he wants and then police capture the man but he protects pip and says he stole the food because he is touched by pips kindness. Then one-day pip is taken to the satis house, the home of miss Havisham, pip meets a beautiful young girl named Estella and falls in love with her. One-day Jaggers who is a lawyer tells pip that he has received a great fortune from a secret benefactor. The man tells pip he must go to London immediately to start his education as a gentleman. Pip thinks miss Havisham has given him the fortune. When pip is in London he finds new friends and begins to treat his old friends coldly, especially Joe. Several years later a familiar face comes in to pips room it is the convict, Magwitch. He then tells pip that he is pips benefactor. Pip then agrees to help him escape London. Compeyson is pursuing Magwitch and pip later finds out that Compeyson is the one who left miss Havisham on the alter and that Estella is Magwitch's daughter. Pip begins to care for the convict but later Pip hears that Estella has married another man. When Pip goes to visit miss Havisham she catches on fire and is burned badly. During the escape attempt Pip and Magwitch are capture by police. Magwitch is sentenced to death and Pip loses his fortune. He gets back together with Joe and later ends up marrying Estella and living happily ever after. I think that the author of this book could have made this book in 3rd person instead of 1st and it could have made it better. I think that this book was well writen had had a good message of dont let money go to your head and know who your true friends are. I recommed this book to anybody.

Rating:
Summary: A love story and a social critique
Review: It may be difficult to rehabilitate Dickens from the reputation assigned to him by his critics, such as his being labelled as a spinner of popular yarns; a prime representative of Victorian strait-laced morality; a notoriously verbose prosaist whose writing teems with rhetorical redundancies and digressions; a careless plotter and over-plotter with a propensity for hyperbolic and grotesque comedy, depicting grim and depressing situations peopled by caricatures and abnormally exaggerated personages. The criticism that he commits a number of unforgivable Freudian flaws cannot so easily be obviated as well. Unlike the more firmly established exponents of the realist novel, such as Stendhal, Balzac and Dostoevsky, with their searching psychological assessments of character and motive, Dickens seems concerned mainly with evoking the idea of a certain character and not the character itself in its concrete, three-dimensional actuality. This explains his penchant for caricature. Nevertheless, his ability to present concrete characters is illustrated in "Great Expectations", one of his later and finer works, particularly the characters of Pip and the convict Magwitch, who are psychologically profound and sympathetic portrayals in comparison to the host of other characters. His ability as a profound satirist and social critic is conclusively demonstrated by his interweaving his analysis of class, injustice and crime with the narrative. Pip, who finds himself elevated from his humble origins to one of the highest strata of society, by being made into a gentleman by a mysterious benefactor, is shocked to discover that this same benefactor, the agent of his social progress, is a despicable criminal who offends him by his sight. The message is obvious: society is a complex network of interrelations that interpenetrate class divisions; Miss Havisham is jilted by Compeyson, who is Magwitch's accomplice; Magwitch is the benefactor of Pip, who is in love with Estella, Magwitch's daughter. All, Dickens seems to say, are equal, regardless of their class or origin, before the judgement of God, which transcends human judgement. This is memorably brought out in the courtroom scene, during Magwitch's trial, in the description of the shaft of light that illuminated the room, "between the two-and-thirty [prisoners] and the Judge, linking them both together and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on with absolute equality, to the greater Judgement that knoweth all things and cannot err." Dickens's moral is the necessity of human fellowship, which we see lacking in the dehumanised Jaggers and Wemmick and in Estella and Miss Havisham, who both come to tragic or regrettable ends, through their coldheartedness and pitilessness. This quality, Dickens's use of plot coincidences to deliver profound human statements, partially redeems him from the charges of being a mere popular storyteller or a romanticist. In this respect, and also with regard to his verisimilitude in rendering authentic detail, he invites comparison with the great realists, such as Flaubert and Joyce, the masters of radical and even amoral realism, though Dickens, with his undisguised moralising, his chaste heroes and puritanical heroines, does not sit comfortably amongst these two; both of whom had works banned, one for his apparent frankness, the other for his obscenity and scatology. "Great Expectations" remains, however, as one of the great representatives of the realist, or social, novel, the product of an age that abolished serfdom and slavery, that witnessed the Industrial Revolution, the growth of large towns and the expansion of business enterprise. as such, it is an invaluable document of its time.

Rating:
Summary: Great Expectations
Review: A classic British novel written by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, is a great novel with a very good moral at the end. The main character, Pip, is a very dynamic character. His morals and thoughts change throughout the book.In the beginning Pip grows up living with his aunt but then he gets an anonymous benefactor who helps him grow up a new life as a boy with a good education and living as an upper class citizen. Throughout the book we see Pip's struggles and he overcomes them. This book draws one in so they are not able to put it down. A good twist at the end.

Rating:
Summary: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Review: This book was very dull and boring. I was made to read it in English and I soon realized not far in that it was very boring. It's not a good book for highschool readers. It is written in very dull and boring text. I mean the theme is great and all but the language and storyline stinks. I would not ever read this book again and if I had a choice to get this book or nothing i wouldn't get anything. It isn't a book to buy but for some odd reason is still have the one left from school. This book is quite possibly the worst book i ever read. If you are really interested in this book then go see the stupid movie or rent i from the library.

Rating:
Summary: Just Great!
Review: Great Expectaitons by Charles Dickens is a good book. I recommend to anyone who enjoys reading realistic fiction books. It captures you from the second you open the book wntil you put it down. It has humor, action, and romance in it. I enjoyed reading it beacse the plot was good as well and the character's personalities.

Rating:
Summary: great expectations
Review: the book was ok but i didn't like it that much so, yeah

Rating:
Summary: great expectaions
Review: this book was good and had many irony. its just didn't like it much because was boring for the early part.only the suspence kick up it was really nice to read..but the ending i didn't like cause it left me knowing that estela won't get with pip

Rating:
Summary: Yuck!
Review: Do not read this book. It is a form of painful torture! If you have to read it for school buy the Cliff Note. Or if your instructor is on to that kind of thing, at least listen to the audio book. At all costs do not read this book! Take it from someone who knows.

Rating:
Summary: The Height of My Expectations
Review: Reading for me is boring, but I was not bored for one second while reading this book. Throughout the whole book Dickens kept my attention and had me wanting more. From the very first page when Pip encounters the convict, I could not put the book down. I had to find out what was going to happen. Also when Pip's sister, Mrs. Joe, was attacked I was guessing to the very end to find out whom it was who attacked her. This is by far one of the best books I have read. All in all, I recommend you read this book. I'm sure that you will enjoy it as much as I have.