Miss Marley: The Untold Story of Jacob Marley’s Sister
By: Vanessa Lafaye, Rebecca Mascul / Narrated By: Josie Dunn
Length: 3 hs and 33 mins
A bittersweet listen, more bitter than sweet
Don’t get me wrong; I LOVE a good tale of hard scrabbling youth making good, especially when there are good doses of writing that depicts just how hard that scrabbling is, and Miss Marley has that, as it’s the tale of Scrooge’s partner in avarice, Jacob Marley and Marley’s little sister Clara. The audiobook starts with the two of them clamoring to perhaps catch some of the old scraps the butcher throws out to dogs and street children, as they are orphaned, penniless, living on the street. Little Clara is also sick with a cough that tears her lungs apart with each hacking bout. But older brother Jacob, whom she calls Jake, is always there to do his best for them both, and he promises her every night that he’ll take care of her, that things will get better, that tomorrow things will look brighter. Then too, he promises that those who have brought them so low, Uncle Robert Marley, will get their comeuppance. Uncle Robert guided their own dear papa down a road of debt, and he turns them to the workhouse when papa dies and the two children are destitute.
A chance encounter with a dying man proves to be their salvation, and it proves to be the first cold act of Jake in one of a long series of increasingly cold and unemotional acts. With the minor financial windfall, they can take a room in a boarding house, giving them an address, giving them a chance to obtain jobs, however lowly and smelly those jobs might be. They get along, pulling their money together until the one time that Clara gets the bright idea that they might loan small amounts of money out to the poor, to those other money lenders will NOT lend to.
And so begins Jake’s slippery decline. He’s all about the money, working his fingers to the bones, working till he’s ready to drop, all for that somewhere down the line of “better”. He keeps gathering money, gathering Clara closer to him, building a fortress that keeps them safe from the outside world.
But as she grows older, Clara wants to be part of that world, especially when it comes to Sam, the goodhearted purveyor of teas at a stall by the shop where she works. Through him, she begins to experience warmth of heart, a keeping of Christmas just as she’s always longed it to be (Christmas has never ever been a time of good cheer and a softening toward one’s fellow man for Jake, now Jacob).
Part of the flaw of the audiobook is Josie Dunn’s narration as there’s not very much warmth in her tones, and Miss Marley is a cold book about a cold man and what that does to his sister and to his “friend” Ebenezer Scrooge, whom he guides away from all things normal, all longings human. She does deliver a bit of the excitement Clara feels as she tries to join the world, but mostly she delivers the iciness of Jacob’s soul and manner, his cold perfunctory manner.
If you’re expecting a story of warmth and redemption, well, there is a bit of closure at the end, for Clara, in a tragic way. Mostly, Miss Marley feels like a prequel that simply explains how Jacob Marley got to be the unyielding almost-monster of a man that he turns out to be in a Christmas Carol. I’d been drawn to it because I thought it’d be about Clara Marley finding the meaning of Christmas, of love, on her own, despite her brother. And the book does that, in a sort of way. But mostly it’s a bit of one tragedy after another.
If you don’t have much time this Season and are looking for warmth and redemption, then let me recommend Jacob T. Marley (at the risk of beating a hobbled horse). It doesn’t have a sister in it, but in Miss Marley, the sister that is there is a very sorry, very tragic figure.
I liked the audiobook, am glad I listened to it, but it didn’t do much to get me into the spirit of things. Rather, it made me a trifle sad…
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