Fiction.

Released.

Picked up at Sound Bites today - looking forward to reading it. :)

SYNOPSIS: The only white man on the island of Bougainville becomes teacher to the local children while a civil war impacts on the lives around them. Mr. Watts introduces the children to Mister Dickens through the adventures of Pip in Great Expectations, but as the narrator, 13 year old Matilda, comes to consider Pip a personal friend, she inadvertently draws unwanted and dangerous attention to their little village.

THOUGHTS: This story is told retrospectively by Matilda, and produces as a result a very detached narrative – perhaps a deliberate ploy by the author due to Matilda trying to distance herself psychologically from events, but perhaps not. By the end, minor mysteries (such as why Mr Watts pulled his wife around on a trolley whilst wearing a red nose) are revealed to be just that, very minor mysteries with little significance to anything else, and events just plodded from one to the other with no sense of suspense, and all possible interpretations of the thin ‘plot’ spelled out word for word by Matilda as the novel progresses. The idea of engaging with the island children through the re-telling of a classic worked well as a concept, but by the end of the novel, I felt as though the whole thing had never really got off the ground, and was, all in all, a bit of a damp squib. The writing was forgettable, and the storyline was singularly lacking in power, failing to convey even the usual poignancy of the standard ‘coming of age’ story. It’s not that it was bad, just that neither was it very good…

Will re-release to Sound Bites next time I pass that way unless requested in the meantime.

Will be travelling to overseas bookcrosser within the next week.

Received in a swap through Swap-bot, thank you!

Not really my cup of tea, moving it along to a fellow bookmoocher in the US... Enjoy!