Mister Pip [Paperback]

This book begs to be read over and over. It's a coming of age story. It's a story about racism, mother daughter relations,and it takes place in a remote island near Australia during a time of war. Matilda, a young girl, invites you into her world as she tells the story. You will fall in love with her and life on the island as she is exposed to another world through Dickens timeless novel, Great Expectations. The effect is transforming. She struggles with her mother's values and dilemmas of loyalty. Looking at war through Matilda's eyes is fascinating and heartbreaking. How she will be changed! The writing is superb and the story is enchanting and devastating at the same time.

If you're like me, reading a good novel involves getting intricately involved in the life and times of its main characters. The internationally acclaimed New Zealand novelist, Lloyd Jones, has produced just such a literary gem that grants the reader a chance to get up close with various types who are struggling to define themselves in the story. The setting is a war-torn island off Papua-New Guinea, where the locals are beseiged on all sides by foreign troops, rebels, and aimless do-gooders like the Watts who have wandered in from somewhere south. The story involves Matilda and her mother trying to cope while the father is working in eastern Australia. Along comes Mr. Watts, who suddenly appears in the local village as the new school teacher. The single, solitary lesson for that year consist of Watts retelling Dickens's "Great Expectations" as it focuses on the life of Pip. He tells it so well that he succeeds in making Matilda actually conceive Pip as a real person in her very parochial existence. The adventures of Pip as he tries to make sense of his chaotic life in Victorian England start to play out as a reference in Matilda's equally uncertain life. The past quickly becomes the present as the children start to see Pip's prospects as being theirs in the future. The old cultural traditions and superstitions of the island get cast aside as even the older generation start to take an interest in this unfolding story. Just as it is wrapping up, the violence of the modern age intrudes on this little fantasy world that is starting to form. The island is attacked by rebel forces and Matilda's sense of hope bound up in this new found identity called Pip is destroyed. All written records that the children have pieced together from Watt's improvised story-telling gradually disappear in a series of devastating raids. Years later, when Matilda gets her life back together, she takes some time out to visit her past and discover the truth about her infatuation with the character Pip. The reader, at this point, should be prepared for a bit of an eye-opening jolt as Matilda learns something about her past that makes her a stronger person going into the future. A great and thought-provoking read especially for those who like a Dickensian-style story.

Go away to an island, a place of myth based on real. A fable story that has a "Little Prince" ability, a Haruki Murakami ability to get your imagination flowing but is also political without being big P political. I.e. Interesting, but still fiction-story-stunning. That magic that was the transporting reason you went to books as a kid. That kind of book. But for grownups.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd
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