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On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.

So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 299121 3.62 2206 609 2006 0 2009-03-29T22:07:37-07:00 566364 190 2009-03-29T22:07:37-07:00 0 2009-03-27T11:23:54-07:00 557243 88 2009-03-27T11:23:54-07:00 0 2009-03-26T09:05:06-07:00 552399 38 2009-03-26T09:05:06-07:00 2 6 false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Mar 26 09:04:12 -0700 2009 Mon Mar 30 15:22:32 -0700 2009 more...]]>