[The Zig Zag Way] was an appropriate title for this book in that it told the story of a cast of characters from various points of view. While it was well written and enjoyable to read, I found its point elusive. ( )

Good book, but I may be biased. I typed the manuscript for the paperback edition when I was an intern at Penguin, so the author kindly signed a copy of the book for me. It was a very intimate way to read the story--literally letter to word to sentence to paragraph. I find myself wondering now if my experience of the book would be different if read as a whole rather than by the small parts of a whole. ( )

Evocative, atmospheric, a little exotic for those who have no knowledge of Mexico; a very slight story, more like journalling your genealogy research. She captures the emotion of discovery of ancestors, the imagining of their lives, the feeling of regret for their misfortunes ( )

This book was interesting. I absolutely love the style of writing. It was vivid and really beautiful. It had a magical realism touch to it, which I loved. The story on the other hand seemed to mirror it's title. It zig-zagged all over the place. I understand what the author was getting at, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if the story just focused on one set of characters instead of the three. Or, if the book was longer had more time to focus on the characters. There was a lot of depth for the characters in such a short bit of text! But I could have kept on reading about each of them long after the story stopped. I was particularly intrigued by the character of Dona Vera. I loved her! I wish there was a whole book just based on her. ( )

Our book club thought:
it very descriptive, you could picture the places and conditions and how the people lived during his grandfathers time in Mexico. Overall it was ok but I felt there wasn’t much body to the story as you didn’t know what happened with Em or hear anything more about his grandfathers life back home seemed lots of `what happened next' was left in the air.

and
I actually found the book very dry and lacking any zest. It didn't draw me in at all. I'm sorry to say that despite my best efforts, I wasn't able to finish it.

Overall we felt that the book lacked substance with plots that didn't really end in a satisfactory way ( )