Carol for Another Christmas
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From the Nebula Award winning author comes this modern Christmas classic.
The chief executive of a Seattle-based high-tech company, Monica Banks is a workaholic who has closed herself off to any kind of home life, family, or love. Then one snowy Christmas Eve, she discovers a ghost in her office computer. The ghost is none other than Ebenezer Scrooge.
Awakened by a bright and lonely eight-year-old girl named Tina using the password “Humbug,” Scrooge is ready and willing to take his turn as a Christmas spirit. But he finds that the world has changed a lot since his day, and though he knows that the spirit of love, generosity, and forgiveness is eternal, it will take more than a little tech support for him to convince Monica before the morning light.
“Reading Scarborough is a joy.”—Anne McCaffrey
“[A] modern Christmas Carol…a beautiful story.”—Midwest Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poor Charles Dickens. Not only has A Christmas Carol been made into an animated feature film with Mr. Magoo as its lead, but now it has suffered the further indignity of being charmlessly transposed by Scarborough (a 1989 Nebula Award winner for The Healer's War ) into the computer age. Ebenezeer Scrooge dies a beloved man five years after the events of the Dickens story, only to be awakened from his eternal slumber. Scrooge, it seems, has been chosen to take his own turn as a moralizing spirit. On Christmas Eve, in modern-day Seattle, the insensitive and sarcastic Monica "Money" Banks, sole inheritor of her brother Doug's international computer company, Databanks, refuses to give her staff time off for the holiday. She demands that her employees complete work on a sinister new software surveillance program contracted by the U.S. government for delivery on January 1, even though her staff assures her that the program will never fly. Meanwhile, eight-year-old Tina Timmons, suffering from a faulty heart valve and a physical deformity, has been secreted in a deserted office while her grandfather performs janitorial duties. Playing with a computer, Tina is befriended online by a mysterious man named Doug, whom she innocently assists in creating a program designed to "help somebody become a better person." When Doug offers Monica a chance to change, she refuses, leaving it to Scrooge to whisk her into a spectral software program designed especially to open the eyes of "the Queen of Mean of the Computer World." This is trite and simplistic modernization of a timeless classic. In a word: humbug!
