Starred review from October 7, 2024
In this magnificent retelling of Oliver Twist, Epstein (Let the Dead Bury the Dead) focuses on one of the original novel’s most controversial characters, Jacob Fagin. The son of a thief, Jacob is raised after his father’s execution by his seamstress mother, Leah, in East London. At 11, he glimpses a pickpocket at work and persuades the man to teach him the trade, at which he proves to be a natural. Leah warns him about the dangers, but he can’t resist the chance for an income far greater than what he could earn at the menial jobs available to lower-class Jews. After Leah dies of fever when he’s 16, Jacob makes his home in an abandoned building. Several years later, he takes in a badly beaten younger boy, Bill Sikes, and the two form a deep bond. By 1838, Bill has matured into one of London’s most daring housebreakers. The same year, Oliver Twist, a minor character in Epstein’s novel, arrives on Jacob’s doorstep and joins his tribe of young thieves, whom Jacob manages as skillfully as he does the risk of arrest. The group’s stability is threatened, however, by Bill’s increasingly reckless burglaries and volatile relationship with pickpocket Nancy Reed. Epstein’s Fagin, rarely admirable but surprisingly sympathetic, is an unforgettable creation, and her vibrant secondary characters and depictions of Victorian London add to the novel’s power. Dickens’s fans and critics alike will love this. Agent: Bridget Smith, Jabberwocky Literary.
December 1, 2024
Acclaimed historical novelist Epstein (Let the Dead Bury the Dead) retells Dickens's classic Oliver Twist through the perspective of its chief villain, Fagin, in the process redressing the criticisms of antisemitism that have dogged Dickens's novel for nearly two centuries. Readers first meet Jacob Fagin as he prepares breakfast for his gang of child criminals, including Jack Dawkins (the Artful Dodger), Nancy, and, of course, Oliver. Nan's boyfriend Bill Sikes is planning a heist and wants the assistance of one of Fagin's wards, setting in motion a chain of events that will be familiar for readers of Oliver Twist. Epstein also takes readers back decades to Fagin's childhood, when he lived with his mother in a Jewish enclave of London and fell under the sway of an infamous pickpocket. After his mother's sudden death, Fagin was forced to survive on his wits, scrounging and hustling with ruthless impunity, forging the reputation that Dickens would immortalize. VERDICT In creating an origin story for the legendary thief, Epstein deftly addresses Oliver Twist's longstanding "Fagin problem," not by sanitizing or disowning him, as other adaptations have done, but by lending him a humanity that Dickens's caricature did not. It's a lively, finely drawn reimagining and a deeply reverent corrective of a literary monument.--Michael Pucci
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from December 15, 2024
A Dickensian world revisited. Historical fiction writer Epstein rescues Dickens' Fagin from his reputation as a slimy character who exploits orphans, training them in thievery in the clotted, filthy streets of Victorian London. Epstein's Jacob Fagin is a lonely, emotionally wounded man; a master pickpocket to be sure, but also a victim of virulent antisemitism from all classes of English society, which treats the "skinny red-haired Jew" as vermin. Growing up in poverty in a Jewish enclave with a vigilant, caring mother, he takes Hebrew lessons with a neighborhood rabbi in the mornings, and, by the time he's 11, wheedles his way into becoming the apprentice to a deft, gaudy pickpocket. It's a skill, he realizes, "he must learn by doing," and soon practice perfects his sleight of hand. He's 16 when his mother dies, succumbing to whatever pestilence has swept through their mean streets--cholera, typhus, consumption, scarlet fever, influenza--and he's left homeless. Epstein traces his fortunes and misfortunes as he manages to survive, settling into an abandoned building that becomes a refuge for orphans and runaways who want to learn his trade: Jack Dawkins, known as the Artful Dodger; Toby Crackit; Charley Bates; briefly, Oliver Twist; and the incorrigible Bill Sikes, who's fled an abusive, alcoholic father. Sikes graduates from pickpocket to housebreaker, from a swaggering boy to a violent man so filled with anger that Jacob comes to fear for his life. Epstein captures the bravado and vulnerabilities of Jacob's motley crew of orphans, and the gritty ambience of the alleys, cellars, and seedy pubs they inhabit. She brings to her portrait of Fagin--and even Sikes--a tenderness and empathy that renders them as palpable: men, haunted by loss, longing to be loved. Vivid characters populate a riveting narrative.
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