The middle grade horror legend R.L. Stine is no stranger to creating stories featuring unlikable characters, but Young Scrooge might take the cake with our main character Rick Scroogeman in Stine’s adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens‘s tale, A Christmas Carol.
Rick Scroogeman hates Christmas. He can’t stand the carols and the pageants. He can’t stand the lights and the mistletoe. But what he hates the most is having to watch the old movie A Christmas Carol every year at school. Since his name is Scroogeman, all of his classmates start calling him Scrooge. And he hates being called Scrooge.
But everything starts to change when three ghosts visit him. At first, he thinks it’s a dream. But then he realizes that it might be a nightmare. A nightmare that could become real.
Stine has tackled the retelling of A Christmas Carol before in Ghosts of Fear Street: Fright Christmas. The 1996 middle grade holiday horror was a solid story based around the Dickens take, but Young Scrooge is a looser adaptation pulling in nods to other classic stories such as Oliver Twist (the name of the middle school in this book). Young Scrooge misses the mark a little as I found it doesn’t fully land the redemption angle found in A Christmas Carol.
Scroogeman might be the most unlikeable character in a Stine story, so much so that I honestly was getting a bit annoyed while turning the pages. Truthfully, I thought Stine might actually go the route of saying that Rick was irredeemable, which would’ve been a shocker in a middle grade story, but also would’ve maybe opened the eyes of a few readers to be better people.
The biggest drawback, outside of Rick’s character, was the fact that I feel Stine didn’t full redeem Scroogeman at the end. In the original A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is a nearly perfect redemption story when the final page is over. He didn’t pull one last trick or do a bunch of nice deeds only to pull the rug out from one person. Scroogeman still needs work by the end of this story, leaving me to think…maybe he can’t be redeemed.
Young Scrooge is one of R.L. Stine’s most recent holiday horrors, but misses the mark a bit. The author takes the classic A Christmas Carol and gives it a modern and more middle grade twist with an extremely unlikable main character. However, by the end I feel the lead character hasn’t fully learned his lessons and misses the mark on what Dickens was trying to accomplish with his original story.
Young Scrooge: A Very Scary Christmas Story is available at bookstores everywhere from Feiwel & Friends. The audiobook, narrated by Andrew Eiden, is available via Libro.fm!
