RM Book Lounge – The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is probably best known for being the Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in the 90s. The Cat’s Table is his captivating, semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy who travels by boat from Ceylon (Sri-Lanka) to Canada, the adventures he has on the boat, and how those experiences eventually make their way into his adult life.

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

“The Cat’s Table is not only about childhood but about the hard-won, if somewhat hackneyed, wisdom of old age. ‘We find our true and inherent selves during youth,’ the adult Michael says. ‘It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow.’” – Jess Row, New York Magazine

“This story of retrospection and introspection moves gracefully through a three-week adventure when the narrator was an 11-year-old boy, traveling on a steamer from Sri Lanka to England. The passing decades have transformed that boyhood voyage into a series of burnished moments, some comic, some tragic, some tenaciously mysterious. The result is lithe and quietly profound: a tale about the magic of adolescence and the passing strangers who help tip us into adulthood in ways we don’t become aware of until much later.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

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Elysha Schickel

After four years of college and creating many answers to the question “So, what next?” Elysha Schickel is starting to figure it all out.  An avid reader who is addicted to researching anything that sparks her interest, and who loves to spread her knowledge to everyone she knows, Elysha is thrilled that at RebelMom, she’s found a way to combine all these interests with her love of writing.   She’s a recent graduate of Providence College with a B.A. in Humanities.