Great Expectations

Rating:
Summary: Profoundly worthless.
Review: Just think of all the trees cut down to make all the additions of this classicly boring novel. This ranks with Catch-22 and Huckleberry Fin as one of the worst novels yet published in the English language. Was there a plot? No. Don't kid yourself. The fool author made it up as he went along not caring if it made sense or if the characters had any meaning. I hate this novel with a passion so great it scares even me. I'd like to see all copies burned. Okay, not really. That's a little extreme. But, at least take this garbage out of school curriculums. Its' making us stupid, making us believe Pip's world is what the world really is. Pip if a fool that got dumped too many times and where's the sex. Was Dickens scared of it. I believe that all great novels should have sex in them. It brings some humanity to them . Great Expectations is a fantasy on level with the Bible but worse, tragicly worse.

Rating:
Summary: A truely fascinating book that leaves the reader satisfied
Review: A book that captivates the ideals of entertainment, Great Expectations is a novel that cannot be put down. Having previously read " A Tale Of Two Cities " for an English topic, I was dissatified with the quality of work that Dickens produced and did not understand the hype surrounding his works and the popularity of sales. Great Expectations has changed my view entirely, as Pip, the protagonist will always be a person that can be related to and felt for. The life of the protagonist experiences many facets of human education, and the outcome is satisfing to himself and to the reader. Dickens has created a true exploration of people and how and who we are. Each chapter ends on a twist and torments the reader into further readings. The life of Pip and the events and characters that involve him work fluently and emphasis this theme. Dickens commonly gives subtle hints of information for the reader to use in working out the complexities of the novel, sometimes leading in the right direction, and other times, in a misleading direction. This keeps the reader informed and eager to process all the facts to conclude their own opinions. The ending is truely " warm-hearted " and acts ideally to conclude the novel. A splendid book not to be neglected from any book collection.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: This may be Dickens' finest novel, for while it may lack some of the comic character that animates his other masterworks, it has a focus and coherence unseen elsewhere in his serial novels. Filled with memorable images and the pain of unrequited love and self-reproach, Dickens has invented a superb comment on wealth, on youth, and on life in general. (Youths forced to read it in high school may not understand the pain of looking back until later in life.)

Rating:
Summary: Grow Old First...Then Try It Again
Review: I, too, languished through this in High School. I, too, vowed never to pick up Dickens again. Then something happened. This is not bragging: it just happened. I grew up. Any intelligence I had mellowed into understanding, a very different faculty. Saddened, changed, I picked up Dickens again. And at last, I understood. Great Expectations isn't a classic for its language, plotting, style or wit. Like all Dickens' work, it is faulted in these areas. It's a classic because of Dicken's passion, which along with Bleak House pours onto the page and if you are at the right time of life, into your heart. So to all the reviewers here who find him problematic, wait a bit. Read a little about the nightmare world he lived in, the choked waterways slimey and poisonous with oil, feces and dye...the dangerous, airless shacks stacked up on each other, the rotten food...when it could be had at all. If you can, too, research a little into the social mores of the day, because what Dickens says about Victorian manners is quite true: virtue was often toggled to wealth in an absurd attempt to justify those unworthies clawing their way to the top of the "Beehive". Try Dickens again later, when you have grown old. He's a ripping good yarn, but you must forgive him...he sees people as tiny valiant miracles amidst a roiling world of injustice, farcical posturing, physical danger, ignorance and want, and he needs to tell you about it. He often jokes about it, because the society he was writing for was very touchy and required its medicine to be sugar coated. It is only after you've put a Dickens book down that the images--minus the wit--pour over you and like the smoke curling through a Dickens novel it occurs to you you cannot breathe...

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books in existence.
Review: Charles Dicken's novel, Great Expectations, teaches a lot to the reader. The best thing about the story is Dicken's development of plotting and characters. It is about a person who experiences grown and shattered expectations from childhood to teenagehood to adulthood. "Great Expectations" basically means what is "expected" in life: a job, a career, money, marriage, etc. Pip helps a convict, Magwitch, in the beginning, to escape by bringing him a file to file the convict's leg iron. In the second stage of Pip's expectations, Pip has always been thinking that his secret benefactor is a certain Miss Havisham (whom he met in childhood), because he thought that her daughter, Estella, was destined for him. At the end of this stage, the benefactor appears, and Pip finds that it is the convict whom he had helped so long ago!! He is filled with repugnance. And Estella also gets married to his most despised enemy. And he is deeply in debt. Pip's great expectations are shattered to pieces by all of this. Later, Pip has to deal with it in the third stage of his expectations, and the story ends with all the people around Pip married, but with Pip still single. But Estella's husband had done so much evil gambling, and he also died in a horse accident, leaving room for relief from Pip. So, the story isn't exactly a happy ending, but it's better than nothing. This is a GREAT book!!

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book In The Pantheon of English Literature
Review: I must admit, this review is slightly prejudiced. I am a high school student, and I read this book for fun. I had tried to read Dickens before, but found myself having a hard time ploughing through the complex vocabulary and intricate parlor dialogue of Hard Times. But I decided to take another stab at Dickens, perhaps with something a little more palatable. All of Dickens' novels, I realized at the end of Book I!!, are VERY, VERY SLOW -- AT FIRST. Then Dickens decides to play on his own soporific introductions!!!!! There is a crucial turn in events for Pip, and the book takes off. Every few paragraphs, there's another handhold so to speak, to keep the reader's suspense and to keep the plot building. Both the language and the many interwoven plots are delectable and unavoidably magnetic -- your hands just can't seem to put down the book, no matter what you do. This book has it all. It also helped me understand why I hated reading the Odyssey for English. (Translations always lose some of the vivacity and fullness that the author has pumped his or her very original work full of, and it is this fullness that made the work so great in the first place.) It is a long read, and you have to be willing to be patient with the beginning. But it's definitely worth it. And the more you read, the easier it gets. After reading this book, I feel inspired to read all of Dickens' works!

Rating:
Summary: Gripping!!!
Review: From start to finish, awesome. From the moment I opened it, until I finished, I was entranced. Read it in one sitting. Without a doubt, my favorite book of all time.

Rating:
Summary: This book represents the passion of his heart..
Review: "Great Expectations" as well as other Dickens novels like "Oliver Twist" were written with a purpose. Dickens was so against some of the evils of his time that he had to do something to speak out against them. And he did. He represents in the lives of his characters the thousands of children forced into inhumane working conditions. And that is just one of wrongs he set out to correct. Carefully read, Dickens provides countless details of English life with its evils and triumphs. I have read several of his novels and always find them inspiring as well as educational.

Rating:
Summary: A true masterpiece!
Review: I am not going to bore you with excerpts from the text. But I'll say this, Great Expectations is one of the most compassionate novels a person can read. The complexity of the plot adds a certain greatness which undoubtedly entices the attention of the reader. The story itself teaches us to never give up hope and that our destiny does not depend on our social status; but rather, the quality of our character.

Rating:
Summary: Yeah, I like it, so what!
Review: Maybe I can ofer insight to anyone who can't possibly see why anyone would ever like this book, because every single person I know, including all of the lit teachers I've had, seem to hate it with a passion. I just think its a great story, do you remember those? Those things that our parents used to tell us about princesses or in my case giant cats that peed on mail men? Its just a story about this painfully tragic romance, and let me say that not all tragedy happens wham-bam everybody dies... its like real life where its very drawn out, very subtle, and that's the way the book has to be. I personally like it becuase its a perfect description of the life I was leading at the age I read it. I do not, however, think it should be forced on freshmen in High School, just becuase they can't have an appreciation for it at that age. Our teacher didn't force it on us, but I read it voluntarily... here I was making a C in the class, never read anything, we read the first chapter in class and I was absolutely hooked. And now look at me, I'm going to be teaching Literature in High School. All I can say is its one of my favorites, and if you're about to read it in school, don't let all these horrible reviews scare you away, read it and make your own opinion, its a great book.