Beautiful. Mesmerizing. In the book Ondaatje describes a church with a spiral steeple. The story sometimes follows the spine of the spiral and sometimes moves up and down along the edges, but always explores family and the transition from child to adult.
"we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives"

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

This is on its way to indygo88 as part of the Reverse Wishlist Relay on BookObsessed.

I meant to journal this when I got it a couple days ago. I JUST saw that you had offered to send me this on the relay board the day before it came, so it was an almost total surprise. Either way, thanks so much for letting me be the lucky recipient! Woo-hoo! :')

I've been trying to thin out my shelves & I'm going to make this available, ONLY because I managed to get my hands on an audio copy as well. Still very anxious to read it!

My review based on the audio:

I remember adding this novel to my wishlist when it first came out because I thought the book description sounded like something that would appeal to me. Having not read anything by Ondaatje before, I guess I was not prepared for his writing style. I'm reading all these other great reviews and frankly, I don't get them. I can appreciate the prose -- it's really well written and beautiful at times, but that's the best I can say. To me, this story went nowhere. Point of view was flip flopping back & forth from the first to third person, the time frame was back & forth in seemingly no logical order, and the transitions were really rough. The first one-third or so of the novel centered around the three main characters as described in the book description. But from then on the story went off on a tangent which, to me, had no real relativity to where the story began. I started losing interest at about that one-third mark, and despite reading on & hoping to see something come full circle, it never did, and I was disgusted with myself for having not given up when I was first inclined to. I haven't rated a book this low in quite a while, and I have to wonder if something's wrong with my interpretation, but this one just didn't do it for me. At all.

Sending off to PBS member. Enjoy! :')

You have found a BookCrossing book! Please take a brief moment to journal your thoughts upon reading this book. Then, if you'd like, re-release the book (to a friend, a stranger, or back out into the wild). That way you can track its travels & its readers throughout the world!