Matilda, a young girl in Papua New Guinea during the civil war in the 1990s is taught in a semi-destroyed school by the only white man on the island. Popeye, as the children have named him, is old and stooped, and his only term of reference for teaching is a copy of Great Expectations. Told from Matilda’s perspective, the prose is engagingly simple and affecting as she learns to love Dickens’ Victorian England, and the book provides not only an escape for her, but brings its own danger crashing into their lives. Her relationship with her mother is a pendulum swing of bitter misunderstanding and fierce sacrificial love that literally took my breath away.
The Lovereading view...
Reviewed on Richard & Judy on Wednesday 27 February 2008.
Set on a small South Pacific island with war looming a teacher brings Dickens to life for a group of children who should be enjoying their paradise surroundings instead of contemplating the impending war moving towards them.
After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matildas island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.For Matilda, Dickenss hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Wattss book begins to inflame the childrens imaginations with dreams about Dickenss London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Joness breathtaking novel shows what magic a childs imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.From the Hardcover edition.
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