Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Title: Life of Pi
Author: Yann Martel
Genre: Fiction
Number for Year: 22
Pages: 319
Review: A boy named Piscine (Pi) Patel, son of a zookeeper, grows up in India, enamored of different religions. He then travels to Canada with his family via ship when the father chooses to close the zoo. The ship is wrecked and he must survive on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Around this, Martel weaves a tale of survival and, in the end, maybe faith.

From the start, the narrator of Pi’s tale says this is a story that will make you believe in God. Does it? I doubt it, but it certainly does a good job of playing with the idea of faith — and with your head as there’s a twist at the end to match any movie twist you’ve ever seen. The ending is probably supposed to be an “a-ha moment,” like when in “The Sixth Sense,” you realize that all the time Bruce Willis’s character was dead, but I’m not quite sure if Martel completely pulled it off.

Despite that, it was a pretty good read — even though it dragged a bit in the middle where the boy was stuck on the lifeboat. But then maybe that was the point, that sometimes life drags on — and you still have to have faith — although that might be putting a little too much faith in Martel’s writing skills. Regardless, it was still a good read and worth the time invested. For me, it’s probably one I’d read again, just to see what I got out of it a second time.