No fluff or fantasy: Mister Pip

OK, OK, I broke my own rule... but it was a gift. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, was a Mother's Day gift.

The narrator, Matilida, uses Great Expectations as a catalyst to escape her war torn world. Through the course of the book, we come to realize that her beloved teacher, Mr. Watts does the same thing, but with him, one can't be sure what is fact or fiction.

Here is the publisher's description of the book:

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s 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, Dickens’s hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts’s book begins to inflame the children’s imaginations with dreams about Dickens’s 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 Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

I thoroughly enjoyed this work, but I have to read it again. It makes me think of Life of Pi to a certain degree, in the sense that the book illustrates how one can separate one's self during times of terrible trauma. Again, it was a highly engaging book with beautiful prose.