It's set on an Island called Bougainville. (I found out it's a real place, an Island in Papua New Guinea...near Australia.) It's told from the point of view of a 14 year old girl, who's living through a terrible civil war in the 1990s. As a reader we never really get to know what the war is about. The only white guy on the Island ends up being the village teacher and reading them Dicken's Great Expectations. This book takes the kids away and opens up their imaginations and they all suddenly realise about the power of dreams. I'm glad I have read Great Expectations, otherwise this book would have been a real chore.At first the book is quite dream like, almost fluffy in its style with lots of descriptions of people staring into space and thinking a lot....I wouldn't have minded all this staring and thinking if the author had given the reader a slight indication of what the HELL they all were thinking about and staring at. I just don't think the author was able to successfully get into the character of being a 14 year old girl because when the tone changed and the extreme violence kicked in, it all just left me cold really. I didn't really care because not one of the characters seemed real to me at all. This Lloyd Jones guy might have transported his main character successfully into the grimy world of Dicken's England but he totally failed in taking me to the tropical island of Bougainville.
It's a shame really because I really wanted to like this book. The idea behind the story was great but I just think this writer was trying too hard to be all 'intellectual' and 'write clever stuff' and failed miserably. Terrible things happening to characters in books only work if they are people that you believe in and this was a sham. To be honest I'm quite angry that the violence left me feeling just slightly sick.
The best thing about this book was the rather beautiful cover.
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