A woman and her husband are marooned on a South Sea island in the 1930s. We are told the story of their life before and after this. Then thirty years later LIFE magazine comes for her and brings her home. Her entire body is covered in tattoos.

This is an interesting and touching story, A unique one as well. The author uses descriptive language without getting flowery. I flowed with the main character's emotions. While it didn't make a huge impression on me I found it a gently satisfying story. ( )

I ended up liking the main character and feeling sympathetic towards her and Phillip even though they were both horribly arrogant and well, I don't think anyone really liked Phillip except for Sara and I think even she was having her doubts. What bothered me though was the way they got their tattoos and how they got stuck on the island. I don't know, it just didn't fit to me. Why would anyone force something sacred, not something done in hate, onto a couple foreigners that damn near destroyed your village and killed your granddaughter?

The book itself is short, an easy long weekend read. ( )

After an interminably slow set-up, this amazing novel moves into high gear for its second half and never thereafter loosens its grip on the reader.

Because Ciment uses a first-person flashback narrative, the reader knows going in that the protagonist, Sara Ehrenreich, is a woman returning to 1970s New York after a 30-year involuntary sojourn on a remote Pacific island, and that her body is now covered in elaborate tattoos. Just how this all came about and what it says about Sara in particular, art in general, and the care and feeding of the human soul overall, makes up the rest of the book.

When we first meet Sara Rabinowitz, she is one of the numberless, faceless seamstresses in New York’s garment district, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and a budding Socialist who falls into a sexual relationship with Philip Ehrenreich, whose talents in the bedroom far exceed his artistic ambitions. The slow building of this relationship and the circumstances that drive them to an ill-starred journey to collect Polynesian ceremonial masks on behalf of a collector form the first half of the book. Teasing flash-forwards from Sara may be the only thing that can drag the reader through this tedious set-up, but the slog is rewarded when the pair finally reaches the island of Ta’un’uu.

Their expectations are shattered when, instead of finding naïve and simple natives eager to trade primitive art for New World trinkets, they find themselves immersed in a culture as alien, detailed, and potentially dangerous as any science-fiction construct ever developed. Their rookie mistakes and unwillingness to adapt to the circumstances they find lead to a tragic accident with horrific ramifications. Sara’s initially reluctant entry into the society within which she and Philip are now irrevocably marooned undergoes a change as deep and permanent as the tattoos which lead her to literally embody the island notion of breath as soul, music as life, and art as an indelible component of both.

Utterly unique in concept, this is a journey through time, space, and being itself. ( )

For 224 pages, the author does a good job navigating such starkly different worlds but I would say the premise would be better suited in a book of 800 pages or more; I wished to go deeper into the 30 years that molded Sara into an elder on the Ta'un'uu island, wanted to delve more into the concept of "what is home" and yet, unfortunately, 224 pages can only afford so much. Beautiful premise, which left me wanting more. Solid 3.5 ( )

This is a fast read although it took a few chapters for me to become truly interested in the story. A New York woman and her husband, both artists, are abandoned on an island when looking to collect painted face masks for a museum. The tribe they meet changes their lives indefinitely. ( )