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The book starts of well enough, an interesting, albeit slightly racially stereotypical depiction of India and Indian consciousness. It traipses in and out of narrative, happy to move the story along but tries to draw you into understanding at least the fundamental make up of its narrator, Pi.

But the whole work is incredibly disappointing, dragging on into tedium once he gets cast away at sea. And the ending? It's just a giant mockery of the time you spent reading the whole tale with the most obvious, the most didactic payoff I've ever read.

You can call it the moral of the story, but the moral is supposed to be gleaned, not smacked in your face like a limp trout.

I think one of the most unforgivable sins is that Pi is simply not likable, anyway. At first he seems fairly earnest, quirky even in his collecting of religions. But when you find yourself rooting for the tiger to tear him apart, you know something's gone horribly wrong.

I can't decide if the ending was just a lazy wrap or the author running out of ideas to end it gracefully. Hell, the "author" in the framed narrative doesn't even have the heart to come back to wrap up his own investigation into Pi's purported tale.