Of all the books I had to read for high school English, Charles Dickens' works were some of my favorites. Thus, I was quite intrigued by an anthology for younger readers that I could share with my relatives. A World Full of Dickens Stories: 8 Best-Loved Classic Tales Retold for Children includes versions of Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Tale of Two Cities.
I wasn't sure if this would be child-friendly excerpts or the whole enchilada. Angela McAllister does cover the entirety of each story in about fifteen pages. I quickly found that I preferred those told in first person, since they had more personality. The third-person stories read more like summaries. Personally, I adore Dickens' humor and found it entirely missing from these versions. A few of his most famous lines are preserved. There are also a few more difficult vocabulary words included, with an index of terms at the back of A World Full of Dickens Stories.
This is a beautiful volume, with a lovely cloth spine and foil on the cover. Jannicke Hansen's pictures add a lot of appeal, with a limited color palette and melancholy tone. There's a personality to them that I think is missing in the simplified text. I do understand the difficulties McAllister must have faced, as Dickens' long, twisty sentences aren't very child reader friendly.
I do think A World Full of Dickens Stories is a decent introduction to these tales, and could perhaps be followed with some of the better movie versions. I would note that although this is an illustrated children's book, it is not meant for toddlers. Dickens' stories involve quite a lot of deaths, many of them unfair, and that is not bowdlerized.
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