What an odd but interesting book, full of photographs, tickets, marginalia, and written as a travel journal which is reflected in the lack of page numbers. A time travelesque feeling about the meeting between Layesh and Lydia. Odd but enjoyable.

Tattoos are indelible marks which might be a metaphor for life or travel in this story, what happens to us is indelibly marked on us.

If you want to read a book about unlikable characters embroiled in inexplicable events that never reach resolution, this is the book for you. It does, however, look very good, which makes me wish the author had given the narrative the same level of care she devoted to the illustrations and graphic design.

One of the oddest books I've ever read. Strange, visually beautiful, intriguing, and utterly unsatisfying. But somehow also appropriately itself. More travel journal than novel, it is filled with luscious descriptions of Moroccan towns, and so much lovely Arabic in the margins. I wonder if I could get away with writing a book like this -- a book that is an unfinished love letter to travel, and mystery, and the potential of unfinished stories (and the unfinished journeys of which they tell). What...

Shortly after David's sister died, I found her copy of this book in my house. I think I would have found it eerily beautiful under any circumstances, but the author's coincidental dedication to David and the way it showed up like a message gave it particularly profound impact. I reread it periodically and find it entrancing every time.

The artwork and cartography are beautiful. It is written as if we are vouers of a travel diary. I have to say I am a succour for these types of books. The characters develop and richen throughout the book,( which is a mystery/fantasy plot-line) but then the ending just leaves us as if there is a whole half a book still to be written. There journey has just begun...
Perhaps that is the point!?

Barbara Hodgson's first novel, The Tattooed Map, is a wonderful story in the style of Nick Bantock. It is published, not surprisingly, by Raincoast Books, the publishers of Bantock's Griffin and Sabine trilogy.Hodgson's The Tattooed Map is about a couple of Canadians who spend much of their time traveling the world. Lydia is a pack rat who talks to almost everyone she meets, takes photographs of people and places, and keeps track of everything in a notebook/scrapbook. She learns languages, studi...

Excerpted from the full review:"Lovers of ephemera, of detailed dealings in flotsam and jetsam: The Tattooed Map will be a gold-starred destination on your literary sojourns. The novel is an archivist’s dream, bordered and fringed with annotations of addresses, grammatical conjugations in foreign tongues, pencilled-in calendars, rows of photograph details, sketches and schedules, of tattered post-its and sepia postcards. Nor does what would ‘normally’ be themed marginalia live merely in the marg...

Depending on the summation you give of this book, it could be classified as a sci-fi novel (appearance of a map tattooed on an arm), romance (travelers were once romantic before fading), or some weird variation thereof. But focusing on either of these plot narratives misses what is really the draw for this book---the graphics. The book is written as a journal narrative of the two travelers, and as they travel around, they add photos, notes, maps, etc. that you would expect to see in the journal ...

I believe I understood what the writer intended with this odd, offbeat story. That is, if it IS a metaphysical story of the beauty and experience of travel and how that is wrapped up with our emotional connections to each other. However, it didn't work for me because I couldn't connect with the characters. It seems sadly ordinary to compare this book with the Griffin and Sabine books, but how could you not? I love to experience books like this, however, Griffin and Sabine was a much better exper...

The strong point of this little book is the descriptions of the places visited, but the author does the same thing better in her non-fiction work Trading in Memories: Travels Through a Scavenger's Favorite Places. Otherwise it is rather weak plot-wise and the multimedia novel is done better in Nick Bantock's Griffin & Sabine - An Extraordinary Correspondence.