Author: Lloyd Jones
Length: 274 pages
Mister Pip
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Description
“In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, ‘A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.’ Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.”
Janet Dore –
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️3/4
“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.”
I wish I had known that this delicious book is best served up with Dickens’ Great Expectations as the first course! I read it, but it was too long ago (2008) to serve me while reading this book. There’s no doubt my rating would have been 5 stars had my memory not faded.
Despite missing a lot of the Great Expectations references, I absolutely loved this book. It’s very well written, the characters were wonderful (especially Matilda, the narrator and main character), and the story was incredibly touching, heartbreaking, and tragic. Loved the message about imperfect people still being able to do perfect things…something I needed to be reminded of these days. You’ll also learn about a beautiful place called Bougainville, a small island in Papua New Guinea that I knew nothing about before picking up this book.
I added this to my reading list more than 20 years ago…I wish I could remember how and why it ended up there. So glad it did!