Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

If you haven't read Great Expectations, don't bother reading this adult novel or you'll be lost.

Matilda lives on some island off Australia in the early 1990s. She's black, poor, and doesn't know it. But the only white man in her village (who is married to a kind of crazy black woman) becomes their temporary teacher during a civil war and begins reading the classic Dickens novel to the schoolchildren. They begin learning storytelling skills and all about Dickensian England. The kids are captivated by Pip even though their own world is falling apart around them.

I completely agree with the reviewer in Publishers Weekly who stated, "but the extreme violence toward the end of the novel doesn’t quite work." I'm glad it wasn't just me. It was like portions of A Long Way Gone just popped into a literary novel. It didn't work. To me, this novel is too literary for high school students and I won't be purchasing it for my high school. I don't even think I could recommend it to teachers, unless they have read Great Expectations.