Rating: 
Summary: What Am I Missing?
Review: After reading all the reviews you know what the book is about so I won't summarize yet again. I recommended this book to my husband before I read it and he was not enthused at all. He kept plugging and finished it but had nothing good to say about it. I read the reviews and thought he just didn't know a good thing. Then I read it and I realized he did know what he was talking about. I struggled to finish it just as he did. During the author's explicit detail describing PI eating everthing from turtle's warm blood to tiger feces, I continued to question why I was still reading this book. There are so many wonderful books out there to read, don't waste your time on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Unlike Anything I've Ever Read
Review: Yann Martel's Booker Prize winning novel is an amazing work. Told with the lightest of touches, the beauty, humour and sheer savagery of Pi's world will stay with you for a long time. It has been months since I finished the novel, and I can't get it out of my mind. Other books read since pale by comparison. Some of Pi's adventures in the lifeboat with Richard Parker (the Bengal Tiger) are harrowing, but it is the final chapters that are truly stunning. The final sentence left me with tears in my eyes. This may well be the best book that I have ever read -it's certainly the best I've read in the past few years.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I have ever read
Review: From the wonderful theology in the beginning of the book through the whimsical and delightful Japanese interviewers at the end of the book, Yann Martel has written something really spectacular. Pi is a charming young man and he handles his life and adventure gracefully. Aside from a few grammatical errors (we no longer seem to have capable editors in this world), the writing is excellent and outstanding. Often when I enjoy a book I am sorry to see it end but not this time. The book was complete when it finished and created a satisfying and meaningful reading experience. I hope there will be more novels.
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Summary: Incredibly original concept and very entertaining
Review: This book is the most original work of fiction I have read in a long time. Upon initial consideration, the subject matter seems too unconventional to be entertaining. However, Martel successfully weaves a tale that is both thought provoking and immensely enjoyable to read. Highly recommend!
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Summary: How can anyone make this up?
Review: I just finished reading this book as part of a school project and I was, in all honesty, not very much impressed by... the first half of it. True, it is a happy and interesting story of a confused boy. But this book only starts to MEAN something once you read the third part. Not wishing to spoil anything for anyone, I won't reveal anything about the contents, but I can tell you, even if the first parts of the book seem a bit conventional (although it is wonderfully fresh storytelling), the third Part will make you want to read the book over, and over and over. I actually suggest you do this.
Simply amazing, it had me all nerves from the Third Part onward.
Rating:
Summary: Great read!
Review: What a wonderful story. What a well written - enjoyable, consistently interesting story!Once upon a time stories were told orally and passed from generation to generation so that they became part of a cultural ancestry or the historical tapestry of an indigneous people. In this bbok I felt as if I'd been invited to join in a story telling by tribal elders beside a bonfire. It's warm and enlightening. This fascinating journal of a journey is descriptively delicious and delivers an ending that makes you feel so inspired and grateful for having picked the book up at all.
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Summary: Literal journey? Symbolic? Pick!
Review: Pi(scene) Patel is an intelligent, mature 16 year old. His knowledge and interests are wide ranging...from a variety of religions to animal behaviour. Yann Martel imbues his character with a questioning mind. For example, why cannot multiple religions be embraced simultaneously without any contradictions? Contrary to the explicit warnings of his zookeeper father, is animal behaviour cast in stone (like religious beliefs)? Undergirding Pi's fantastic journey is his name Piscene...voluntarily shortened to Pi because his name was constantly being ridiculed. Pi is a numerical constant...a symbol of the inviolability of the beliefs with which he's being surrounded? His beliefs are put to the proverbial test when his journey to the family's new home in Canada is literally shipwrecked. Pi is the sole human survivor; however he is further challenged by his shipmates...three animals that accompany him on his physical and spiritual journey. They were on their way to new zoo homes. Pi's companions are an orangutan, a Bengal tiger, a hyena and a zebra. The Bengal tiger soon devours the other animal life and it's Pi and the tiger against the elements. Pi rightfully wonders when he'll be next. That's where his ingenuity takes over and the survival of both man and beast becomes equally important to him. Richard Parker, said tiger, requires constant food and fresh water. Pi, thanks to Mother nature, provides Richard Parker with a regular diet of fish, turtles and other fruits de mer and utilizes the lifeboat's survival manual and equipment to make fresh water. Pi structures his day in order to survive. Make water, pray, catch seafood, clean lifeboat while avoiding Richard Parker's pounce. But Richard doesn't pounce. So much for pre-determined animal behaviours. Pi also sees himself within an awesome sphere surrounded by incredible skies and stars at night, a veritable peephole into the universe he muses. Along the way, just when all hope seems to fade, both Richard and Pi find a strange island. Hallucination? Fantasizing? The island does not fit any known pattern...fits no expectations. Another challenge to pre-ordained thinking? Ultimately Pi finds land, Mexico, and is rescued. Richard Parker disappears into the landscape. Was Pi Richard Parker? Did any of this really happen? Pi's tale is certainly debated and found less than credible by the Japanese shipowners' representatives. They want just the facts. How did the ship explode? What noises did the ship make before exploding? Just the facts! Pi nonetheless sticks to his story and provides another conundrum to the firm representatives when he invites them to select what they perceive as the truth(s) in two versions of the same story he tells. One is as he lived it with all its incongruities, the other is as they would have it be. Pi and Richard, and a very clever author, test our imaginations and take us on an interesting physical and spiritual journey.
Rating:
Summary: Good but challenging
Review: I enjoyed "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, however it was a challenging read. When I first read the book, I found it rather disturbing, and disliked it. It took me a while to fully comprehend and appreciate metaphoric aspects of the book. This book would be fun to read with a Lit class or a reading group.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic and creative
Review: An amazing story about a boy forced to learn about himself and life while trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger. The twist at the end makes it impossible for this book to be boring.
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Summary: Faith
Review: Young Pi Patel, obedient son of a zookeeper in India, has embraced Christianity, Indouism and Islam, not to make an adolescent rebellion, but simply because he has found in all three religions one single faith and global understanding of the need to believe in a higher power. The ship which carries him, his family and some of the zoo's wild animals to Canada becomes a wreck and Pi is found adrift in the Pacific Ocean with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and Richard Parker, an immense Bengal tiger. After a vicious sorting out of animal supremacy, Pi is left with Richard Parker, wondering whether he will be the next victim of his co-survivor's fury and most of all hunger.
Yann Martel is playing with the reader, shows Pi's endless quest for the one and only truth, grants him with insurmountable patience and courage and gives us one of the best buddy relationships ever to appear in literature. Pi struggles, endures famine, manages to find a modus vivendi with Richard Parker and most of all keeps his faith to ...what? Survival, life, inner power. It will be trite to call Life of Pi a great book and Martel a great and promising writer. If you have wondered how you would react under conditions of real dispair, if your fears tend to overcome your will, if the path you have chosen to lead your life makes you stop once in a while and ponder whether you are going to get lost or have already missed the true meaning of your quest (whatever that may be), then reading this book will show you not which road to take or amendments to make, but that the only thing you need to keep, precious as your life itself and maybe even more so, is faith. The true meaning of the scenery that Martel's depicts is that irrespective of the true realms of reality, we alone carry our fears and dress them up in different shapes and forms. But we should also do the same as concerns the true essence of the power we need to overcome anything and everything that casts a shadow in our own existence. Pi fought for his life, period. Pi won. The "how" and "how could that be" is something else. You need to read it, feel it, see it for yourselves. There are people who have loved this book and a few others who have condemned it for mediocrity. I suggest noone should fall into the trap of categorising this excellent work. It is a view of life we encounter only rarely in our literary adventures. Just embark on it and enjoy what it offers and there is plenty there. Not only do I recommend this book, but most importantly I humbly bow to Martel's genius and imagination.
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