This is a tough book to rate. I loved the second two thirds because it was a very nice new way of showing what happens when a true scrooge sees his life in a new light and makes some key changes. The characters were interesting, warm and real. The ending was as you would expect - a very happy ever after.

The first third, though, maybe because the story is so well-known, felt long and unnecessarily detailed and drawn out. Some of the facts were needed to establish the key elements of this version of the story, but there were parts where I wished the author would have summarized more.

Overall I still liked the story a lot. Anyone who is looking for a new interpretation of 'the scrooge' is sure to like this version. ( )

For once, I'm going to link to the author's own comments around the time he wrote the book.

http://ryan-field.blogspot.com/2009/11/love-in-which-you-can-believe.html

The quote he uses in the blog:

from page one, Carl's negativity and his cold blooded attitude toward everything that is good and decent about love and Christmas is chronicled. And he's not well loved by anyone else, either. All the negativity within him, attracts even more negativity to him.

is very true.

Carl's meanness and negativity is very strongly drawn at the start, almost to the point of caricature, but hey let's face it. The story is about ghosts and morals. Even the original one was way OTT.
( )

you believe in Christmas miracles, second chances, and absolute true love, then this remarkable journey of rediscovery will guide you through one selfish man’s quest to recapture everything he thought he’d stopped loving.

Wealthy Carl Smite, owner of a high-end antiques store in Greenwich Village, hates Christmas so much he takes the last dollar bill from a sick delivery boy with one leg on Christmas Eve. Carl despises everything that is good and pure about Christmas, including the fact that his employee devotes his time to handing out free dinners at a homeless shelter.

But when Carl goes to sleep on Christmas Eve, he never expects to receive a visit from the ghost of his former business partner, Marty Keller. Marty explains that Carl will have a visit from three Christmas ghosts that night.

The solemn Ghost of Christmas Past takes Carl back to a Christmas when he was in love with the most wonderful man in the world. The lighter, beautiful Ghost of Christmas Present shows Carl what happened to the love of his life and introduces him to the son he never knew he had. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who is actually the flamboyant ghost of gay icon Quentin Crisp, shows Carl the horrible things that will happen to him, and all the people he loves, if he doesn’t start loving again.

And while Carl is working through a Christmas Eve he’ll never forget, the romance moves toward a joyful climax of enlightenment and transition as he searches for the true meaning of life and hope. By the time Carl wakes up on Christmas morning, will he be ready to reclaim his lost love and give back what he's taken from the world?
This author is best know for taking Well known stories and re-working them with Gay character's.
He is very clever and this was a very entertaining spoof of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol".
Highly recommended. ( )

A Christmas Carl is the retelling of the Dickens' seasonal story A Christmas Carol, and so, yes, most of you already know what will happen to Carl during the Christmas' night, he will be visited by three ghosts, of the Past, Present and Future Christmas, and he will learn from his own mistakes. But this is the 'gay' version of the story, and so Carl is not an old a bitter man, he is a young and bitter gay man. Carl hates Christmas since 15 years before, on a Christmas night, he lost the love of his life, Victor. From that moment on, Carl has denied all his old self, closing his heart in a cold safe, and little by little changing in a man that Victor would not recognize.

The most interesting thing of the novel is to read of the little 'gay' details the author manages to fit in the 'classical' Christmas tale. Carl is fit and handsome, Able, his employee, is a young man who dresses well his low waist jeans, the Ghost of the Christmas Present has high heels red shoes, and the Ghost of the Christmas Future is Quentin Crisp. Moreover, Carl not only enjoys sex with his past lover Victor, but we also read of different other sexual encounters he has in the next future, that more or less serve to prove that Carl is slowly descending in the darkness of loneliness, but in one of them, he is with high knee black boots and black leather long coat... Carl could be descending in hell, but damn it if he is not doing it in full black leather style!

So the story is a mix of naughty and nice; all the Christmas feelings around, the bells ringing and the people doing good action is the nice part; the use of very graphic details to describe Carl's sexual life and even his intimate body part, is the naughty one. And the 'naughty' word has here the joyous connotation of Christmas time, since even if detailed, I always felt like the author was blinking his eye to the reader, he was never really 'bad', he was more like a child who was stealing a cake under his mom's nose.

Basically the story is a romance, but again it's not a romance with a too much pink clouded perspective. There was a moment in the story, while Carl was reliving his last Christmas with Victor, when he says that after Victor, there hasn't been anyone else in his life. Me, as an obtuse romance reader (and yes, as a female obtuse romance reader, and yes, I'm joking... don't take me too seriously...) promptly jumped to the idea that Carl had no one else in his life since Victor, that he was always faithful to his first and only love, that he spent his life alone mourning his lost lover... only to find in the next chapter Carl, with the above said black leather boots, cruising for anonymous sex! It made me think, really. I though on Carl's words, 'There hasn't been anyone else since then'... for Carl they meant that no one else has been in his heart since Victor! For absurbo, me, the romance reader, was thinking to a trivial thing like sex, and instead Carl was speaking of something more deep and romantic, like his heart. Carl was really more romantic than the romance reader that was me.

Again the author manages to write a light romance that it's not light at all, it has a lot of hidden layers and each reader will find the one he/she is more interested in.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002XULFXG/?tag=elimyrevandra-20