Charles Dickens: Scenes from an Extraordinary Life
This colorful, fully illustrated book offers a simplified biography of Dickens, shows how his books reflected aspects of his life, and comments on social conditions in nineteenth-century England. Stretching across each double-page spread is a large pencil-and-watercolor illustration with smaller insets of first-person text representing Dickens’ point of view and single or multiple comics-style panels that comment on his life or retell one of his best-known stories. For example, an eight-frame abridgment introduces Little Dorrit and ends by exhorting children to read the novel. Maps of London appear on the endpapers, while the back page carries a glossary, a list of Dickens’ works mentioned in the book, a list of sources (without page references) of “Dickens ‘own words’” used in the text, and a list of the authors’ inspirations and general sources for the book. Ambitious and complex, this attractively illustrated book presents a good deal of information in a highly accessible format. Grades 3-5. --Carolyn Phelan