While I enjoyed the story over all, I found this to be longer than needed, and with too much overblown prose for my taste.
The story follows Pip, as he grows up an orphan, taken care of by his sister. We see him change as he comes into his ‘great expectations’, money and promise of land and other inheritance from a mysterious source. The money and promises of a future cause him to leave his family and friends behind.
The book is a mash of multiple stories that to me, didn’t seem to be related other than on the surface.
We have Ms Havisham, the broken hearted woman who lives in her wedding dress and never lets the sun touch her and keeps all the clocks stopped at the moment her heart broke. And Estella, raised by Ms Havisham to break the heart of any man she encounters, as a sort of revenge on all mankind.
Then we have the convict that Pip meets at the start of the story, who comes back to his life over and over again.
These seem at first to be two separate stories with separate morals/purposes. And at the end we find they are connected, but only by blood. It didn’t follow to me what the two stories had to do with each other, besides than that surface level connection. It’s possible I missed something.
In the end, Pip learns that your family and friends who love you are worth more than money, and advancement in life, and you shouldn’t take them for granted or look down on them–a lesson that seems to have little to do with the main things that happened in the story (Ms Havisham’s story and the convicts story.)
In the end, it came across to me as something written just for the sake of writing, with a story muddled out of it in the process. Despite that, it was enjoyable, and made me laugh and smile and feel on several occasions.
Jonas David 