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After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger.

We started “reading” the audiobook version of “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel back around Christmas time and on the way to Miami this weekend, finally finished it. Too bad Ang Lee’s movie is out of theaters now, guess we’ll have to rent it.

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for the movie, you probably know that the main plot of the story revolves around a young Indian boy named Pi, shipwrecked and trying to survive on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger. That’s pretty much all I knew going in so the rest of the book really surprised me, in a good way.

Told all in the first person, the first part of the book tells the story of Piscine’s childhood in India, growing up in the Pondicherry Zoo with his parents and brother. In addition to learning a lot of the habits of animals and the zoo ecosystem, we learn how Pi found beauty in religion … not just one religion, almost all of them. These formative years have a strong influence on his behavior in the rest of the story. At the end of part 1, the family has sold the zoo and is moving to Canada with some of the remaining animals on a large Japanese cargo ship.

Spoiler alert: the ship sinks.

The middle part of the book describes Pi’s 227 days stranded at sea with the bengal tiger (amongst other things) and then the final few chapters are mostly a “transcript” of interviews between Pi and representatives of the Japanese shipping company who are trying to figure out why the ship sank.

As I mentioned there are strong religious themes in the book, as well as math (pi, of course, and there is even a meaning as to why it’s exactly 100 chapters) intertwined between beautiful imagery, emotional intensity, and page-turning storytelling. After you finish reading “Life of Pi” you’ll have ask yourself the question: which one is the better story? And you’ll know the answer …