This book began brilliantly, and I was captivated. I'm a big reader, and I've never come across anything quite like it. I was absolutely fascinated by the characters. But, as with the review by trishtrash below, I was disappointed in the final part of the book. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs, and I no longer was interested in the fate of Matilda, the protagonist.

Pop Eye, better known as Mr. Watts, takes it upon himself to educate the children despite a lack of supplies and textbooks.

This book engaged, bored, gripped, shocked and then lost me again, leaving me with an uneven impression of its overall worth… it might have helped if I felt even a modicum of the warmth that Matilda, the principal character, did for the characters of Great Expectations. No one who has ever lost themselves in a world of books to escape parts of their childhood will find it hard to identify with Matilda during the majority of this book, and the story of her life on the island was very well told; but during the last thirty or so pages, the entire ending seems to wander off, the book tries to do something else, and left this reader a little disappointed.

An okay read, though I can understand why some might have enjoyed it far more than I. ( )

the ann frank of the pacific: a 13 year old girl tells the tale of growing up on an island in the pacific where after civil war, they are cut off from the rest of the world. The enigmatic Mr. Watt, agrees to teach the children and uses Great Expectations by C Dickens as the text book. Mathilda learns about the power of books and paralels between her life and Pip, the main character of Dicken's book. A powerful lovely book.

Every avid reader has had the experience of being drawn so deeply into a narrative by the skill of a talented writer that real boundaries suddenly yield to the life of the imagination. In his captivating novel Mister Pip, New Zealander Lloyd Jones richly celebrates that magical experience.

Mister Pip is set on Bougainville, a small island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that finds itself in the midst of a bloody civil war between government soldiers known as “redskins,” and rebels dubbed “rambos.” Soon the rambos shut down the island’s copper mine and the redskins respond with a naval blockade. The island’s inhabitants, including the narrator of the novel, a bright and engaging thirteen-year-old named Matilda, are thrust into a struggle for survival.

In the midst of this turmoil, an enigmatic white man named Mr. Watts, nicknamed “Pop Eye” by the island's children, steps forward to assume the duties of their teacher. Recognizing that circumstances preclude the teaching of a conventional curriculum, he instead introduces his students to Charles Dickens’ classic, Great Expectations. From the first chapter, Matilda and her classmates identify with the story of the orphan Pip, striving to relate his experiences in mid-19th century England to the harsh realities of their own lives. When the text from which Mr. Watts has been reading mysteriously disappears, the children demonstrate the extraordinary degree to which they’ve internalized the story by their ability to reconstruct much of the novel’s plot from memory.

Like many hungry for control, the warring factions recognize the subversive power of great literature and Mr. Watts’ infatuation with Great Expectations ends in violence and tragedy. But in an emotionally powerful coda to the story, Matilda reveals how her life has been changed irrevocably by the love of literature inspired by Dickens’ novel.

Mister Pip has been published to great acclaim in Australia and the United Kingdom, and was the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2007. It’s a generous and moving exploration of the almost miraculous way in which books can transport any reader across vast expanses of space and time. ( )