Customer Reviews
Well written, but not for me - By: IWFIcon, 18 Dec 2008 
You don't have to enjoy a book to recognise that it is a well written one. Tim Winton's Breath is one such book for me.
Perhaps it was just my lack of interestin surfing, but I cannot say that I was grabbed by the book as a story.
That said, it is wonderfull writtenin parts & for anyone who finds the subject matter more interesting than me, this makes a great book.
A bit too much surfing - By: MaryAnne, 18 Dec 2008 
This must be a fantastic book if you're a surfer, but as a layman I found the surf-talk took up too many pages.
Having said that, it did have a lot going for it - astutue observations on the teenage drive for danger, the need to go further, always pushing to the limit.
There were some wonderfully descriptive passages - "the ocean clicked & rattled". But the lengthy descriptions of wave motion as related to surfing were a bit excessive.
The characters were well drawn, particularly the two boys & their mentor, Sando. His wife, Eve also grows as a character through the book.
The first part of the book covers the boys' teenage years but I felt Pikelet's mature years were too rushed & a bit random. I don't want to say too much here but there were certain aspects of his life that I didn't feel fitted.
So, allin all a reasonable read. We discussed it for a book club & it received a mixed response. I'm glad I read it but won't be recommending it to friends.
Ozziecozziedrama. - By: O. B. Douglas, 09 Dec 2008 
I've never been to Oz, never surfed (or wanted to), but I enjoyed this enormously. It's well written, apart from the oddity of some of the missing punctuation as noted elsewhere. It's dark, no bright sunlit views of the world here, & some explicit passages, so not for the faint hearted. There are tons of reviews here, what can I add? If you enjoy something a little different to Richard & Judy, you may well like this, if you just like an airport novel, you probably won't, & that's fine.
Drifting with the tide - By: Richard Kelly, 07 Dec 2008 This is the first novel I have read by Tim Winton, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. We get a novel that on the surface is about surfing, & whilst surfing does make up a significant portion of the novel it is not really what it is about. The book starts & end with loss, caused by autoerotic asphyxiation & it is the loss at the start which causes Pike (our protgonist) to launch into the story of his past.
Pike & Loonie, the local hell raiserin small town Austrailia meet with Sandro & famous surfer & form an unlikely bond. During their relationship with Sandro lots of surfing takes place, & it gets more & more extreeme, but this is used as a means of self dicovery within the book. The dynamics within the three are constantly changing. We find that Pike has limits, whereas maybe Sandro & Loonie don't have the limits of mere mortals...There is also Sandro's wife & Pike's relationship with her is maybe the hardest part of the book.
People will complain about the puctuationin the prose, but you can work out which words are spoken & which ones are not fairly easily - there were a couple of times when I wasn't sure, but none were critical to my understanding of what was happening.
This is a book about loss, courage, limits & surfing pretty muchin that order. I liked it but I can understand why poeple would be put off by the subject matter.
brilliant - By: D. Graham, 04 Dec 2008 An intense novel about surfing, live & love. The only reason I've given it four stars instead of five is that I felt the ending was weak compared to the wonderful first two-thirds of the book. The descriptions of surfing & being out on the ocean were wonderful & had real sense of atmosphere. Characters came alive on the page & the story fairly rattled along.
So, five stars for the first three-quarters, four for the ending. Definitely one to pick up if you have any interestin surfing or the big blue seas...
