Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Lippincote

I was attracted to this book for many reasons including the cover, which shows a small boy trapped on a lifeboat with a 450 pound tiger.

This small boy is Pi Patel, who has spent the first part of the novel exploring his religious beliefs. He then - as another reviewer has stated - gets to become God. Or does he?

His family are lost in a shipwreck, while traveling to Canada with their small zoo. Pi survives and, in a moment of weakness, helps on board his small life raft a tiger, named Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is not a Disney tiger. There is no friendship between man and beast, only appeasement. Vegetarian Pi has to kill, or allow to be killed, other innocent animals in order to feed the tiger and save himself.

And who is this tiger? Does he even exist? Is he, rather than Pi, God? Or is he just Pi's own survival instincts manifested in a form the boy can deal with?

This is not a book for the faint hearted. One person I forced it on was appalled by the animal deaths, and refused to finish reading it. My son also refused to even begin the book, on the basis that there is virtually no action. Or at least no action that appeals to the average, active boy.

So The Life of Pi is not for jocks, the easily discouraged, or the overly sensitive. However, for an intelligent, older teen, who is able to do the work necessary to interpret this book, it could be life changing.