Name All the Animals: A Memoir

Additional Name All the Animals: A Memoir Information

A luminous, true story, Name All the Animals is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss.

As children, siblings Alison and Roy Smith were so close that their mother called them by one name: Alroy. But on a cool summer morning when Alison was fifteen, she woke to learn that Roy, eighteen, was dead. This is Smith's extraordinary account of the impact of that loss -- on herself, on her parents, and on a deeply religious community.

At home, Alison and her parents sleepwalk in shifts. Alison hoards food for her lost brother, hides in the back yard fort they built together, and waits for him to return. During the day, she breaks every rule at Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls, where the baffled but loving nuns offer prayer, Shakespeare, and a job running the switchboard. In the end, Alison finds her own way to survive: a startling and taboo first love that helps her discover a world beyond the death of her brother.

Heartbreaking but hopeful, this is about the excitement and anguish of Alison's first love, about her parents' enduring romance, about a community's passion for its faith, and about a beautiful, well-loved boy who dies too young.

What Customers Say About Name All the Animals: A Memoir:

I definitely think people should read this book. It opens your perspective and gives a very unbiased view of her own life, if you can actually do that. I was enthralled from the get-go and read it like how most read "Harry Potter."

This was really good- for a memoir, it read just like a novel. I was just impressed by the whole book. Whereas many memoirs have an inherent sense of distance in relaying the events and experiences of their past, this one had a real sense of immediacy. There were very sentences that relayed anything of the future - no real hints as to how it all "turned out." She is a very talented writer and I would read just about anything else that she wrote. It was very emotional, and just. quite excellent.

Alison Smith must have been a bit unbalanced to start with to have had such an extreme reaction to grief, involving years of anorexia and occasional suicidal ideation. The superstition and narrow-mindedness of her Catholicism as practiced by her family and school is almost a character in the book. Her "coming out of the closet" with Terry is left dangling with no account of the aftermath with her family, friends or herself. We never learn of how her grappling with her sexuality is continued or resolved. All in all an engaging book but one left with unanswered questions that would have made it more satisfying. This girl needed therapy to help her resolve her demons and I hope she got it.

It really is a very interesting, totally believable (to me), coming-of-age story, complicated by the death of her brother. Apparently there is more than one audio version of this book - the one I heard was narrated by Christina Moore and she was terrific. I suspect I enjoyed listening to it more than I would have liked reading the print version. It probably is more real for those of us who grew up Catholic during that time period. Very thought provoking and poignant but likely to not be appreciated by those who are looking for lots of action, adventure, excitement.

This book was in a batch of books someone gave me. I don't need a plot if there is character development or the writing is just beautiful. It started slow and never picked up speed. I kept waiting for something to happen (OK, something happens but I just don't care), and now, 50 pages later, it's beginning to dawn on me that it's not going to get any better. None of that here. Sorry.