Mister Pip - Lloyd James

Mr Pip, centres around a young girl caught up in civil unrest on an island in the South Pacific.  When everyone who can flees, and only a small village remains,  one of the only remaining White Man decides to take on the task of teaching the local children. However he is not a teacher by trade and the only information he has at his disposal is a copy of Great Expectations. 

Borrowed from a friend - I read this because I saw it on the shelves and thought it looked interesting.

Mister Pip is the story of a girl living on an island in the south pacific during the Civil war, and how the book Great Expectations helps her get through everything.  It’s a story of growing up, changing and progressing through the world.

However I failed to enjoy this book. It took me at best 3 hours to read this book, and that’s not because I couldn’t put it down, its because it was small and I wanted to get it over with.  I found the writing style dry for the first three quarters of the book, with not much going on and no pace being set.  Then the writer decided to go off on a tangent with a campfire story and you start to think, what the hell he is going on about. Next he gets himself back on track and says ohh I think I forgot the drama and does this with a bit of overkill and leaves you wondering where it came from, with no build up to this point in time so it’s a little unexpected. Plus the drama doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the story. As if you’re watching a Happy Disney film and all of a sudden the princess gets eaten by the Dragon and everybody dies, end of film. It’s almost as if he’s trying to find a tie in with the beginning of the book and his ending and he’s not sure how. Then theirs the ending….well he kind of kills the ending a bit quick and it seems very rushed and a bit like well this happened then this and then this and we are done. Did he have a deadline to meet and had to finish it off overnight…like a badly constructed essay?

This book did not work for me at all, I found it dull, bits of it unnecessary and uninteresting. He tries to write from the tribe’s point of view and fails to fully capture the characters. He throws in little tribal stories, but it’s as if he’s heard them somewhere and thinks that sounds interesting let’s see if I can squeeze it in, and there fore lacks the flow of the story.  It seems too much trying to write from the point of view but can’t let go of his western roots. The story for me did not flow well and just didn’t excite me or thrill me in any part of it.  Not a book I could recommend to read.