Today, LitNuts is shining a spotlight on Scrooge's Folly: Saving Jacob Marley, a unique romantic comedy from author and screenwriter David Weinberg that is sure to be a great read for the holidays, whether it's a gift for someone else—or a gift to yourself!
"A bold, playful riff on Dicken’s classic, bursting with ghosts and ideas." ~BookLife by Publishers Weekly
Scrooge's Folly: Saving Jacob Marley
Genres: Romantic Comedy, Literature & FictionPaperback: From $15.80
Ebook: $4.99
A Scrooge and Marley you never knew existed!
Award-winning but down-on-her-luck playwright Andrea Smilow is commissioned by The Playhouse in Connecticut to save it from bankruptcy with a new work. When she arrives, she discovers that The Playhouse is inhabited by Jacob Marley’s spirit—and he wants her new play to be about him…to set the story straight about how Dickens ruined his life with A Christmas Carol.
Andrea comes to believe Marley needs to be reunited with the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge, who lives in the caretaker house. This is all Scrooge’s idea: He has been working with Andrea’s roommate, the most powerful witch in North America, to win a second life for Marley…and to get Marley and Andrea to fall in love.
In Scrooge's Folly, Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley were friends of Charles Dickens and merchant bankers who refused to finance A Christmas Carol. Dickens retaliated by turning them into elderly curmudgeons in Dickens' story. Scrooge eventually becomes a beloved Father Christmas, but Marley is forever wrapped in chains—so much the laughingstock in London that his marriage and his happiness are destroyed. Even in the afterlife, he hungers for redemption.
Weinberg's Scrooge's Folly: Saving Jacob Marley proves love and redemption are always possible...even for the dead. It's a great "beach read romance" that just happens to take place at Christmas!
Review from BookLife by Publishers Weekly
"Weinberg’s clever, surprising riff on and corrective to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol launches from a fruitful question: How could God let Scrooge be redeemed, while Marley wandered forever, wrapped in chains? The answer, when it eventually comes, involves love. Also: the transmutation of life into fiction and fiction back into life, achieved through magic, the theater, ghosts, the life of Charles Dickens, and God herself—who looks like a blonde Tina Fey. Also crucial are the machinations of witches of both the 19th and 21st centuries, one of whom treats her lover, an unknowing real-life Scrooge, to a sorcerous vasectomy. For all its wild inventions, at this novel’s heart is a portrait of a contemporary playwright, whose work brings her not just a Tony at age 25 but the attention of someone she never could have expected: the ghost of the actual Marley, the man whom Dickens—in, as Weinberg imagines it, a fit of pique and divine inspiration—immortalized as Scrooge’s partner in the Carol.
"The book is wild, comic, sexually frank, restlessly inventive. The narrative vaults over centuries and lives, between mortal and ghostly realms, its best scenes established with quick telling details, about contemporary theater or the gentlemen’s clubs of Victorian London. Like Dickens’s classic, Scrooge’s Folly opens in the real world, introducing the fantastical to reveal human capacity for charity and redemption."
Read the entire review here.
More praise for Scrooge's Folly
"Readers of intelligent comedy, well-plotted amours, and almost logical fantasy will enjoy Scrooge’s Folly, an intriguing intermeshing of classic literature with thoroughly modern memes." ~Feathered Quill Reviews
"Weinberg takes two well-known characters from Dickens and enlarges their lives and expands upon both their back story and their futures, certainly doing for Marley what Pinter did for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." ~Amazon Review
"A heartwarming tale of second chances filled with love, redemption and miracle. Prepare to be enchanted!" ~The Book Nanny
About the Author
David Weinberg started writing screenplays when he was 30. Some three-plus decades (and a Nichols Fellowship and awards/recognition from Screencraft and Creative Screenwriting) later, he is still at it and was set to produce a Christmas-themed romance when Netflix suggested that he do the story as a novel. Thus, the birth of the romantic comedy Scrooge's Folly: Saving Jacob Marley.Learn more at DavidWeinbergAuthor.com and be sure to follow David online:
