3.5 Stars 
 "I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape." 
 An expansive narrative, but with no useless filler characters or glaringly frayed ends left unkempt by the end. The book is as much of a blatant moral lesson as Dicken's A Christmas Carol, but covering a much broader timeframe and with a far surpassing glut of descriptive wordiness. 
 Our POV character comes in the form of young Pip, an impoverished orphan who was raised by his malignant older sister and her simple but kindhearted blacksmith husband, Joe. As a young child, Pip encounters an escaped convict and treats him with compassion--despite the man's surliness and threats. The convict is eventually recaptured. Shortly thereafter, Pip falls in love with the beautiful and heartless young Estella--who is the charge of reclusive, vengeful, and well-to-do Miss Havisham--and has been raised to be a vile sort of man-eater. Pip is poor, and so has no "expectations" for his future... which naturally means he has no chance of winning the heart he insists on believing Estalla must have. 
 When a mystery benefactor offers Pip a fortune, Pip sets about becoming a gentleman. His sights firmly fixed on Estella, he moves to the city--neglecting Joe and the young woman who made an initial attempt at teaching him to read and write before he ever had such great expectations. 
 "There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth." 
 Pip and Joe's relationship is a consistent highlight. Theirs is an amalgamation of father/son, mentor/mentee, and fellow sufferers under the reign of Pip's sister's verbal and physical abuse. Joe's love for Pip is steady and self-sacrificing, while Pip's is regularly reassessed and circumvented by his ambitions and embarrassment over Joe's utter lack of education and breeding. 
 "In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong." 
 Miss Havisham is a hauntingly acrid embodiment of bitterness. Hell hath no impotent fury like a woman spurned at the alter, who then dedicates herself to isolation and the brainwashing of an adoptive child. (I've created a self-destructive sociopath as my only legacy--take THAT lousy men everywhere!) 
 To the very end, I hoped that plot thread might resolve with more satisfaction than I was actually granted. 
 Overall, I enjoyed this read more than Oliver Twist, but less than A Christmas Carol or A Tale of Two Cities.