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 don't know what the significance of it is. I just recently finished "Name all the Animals". Other than that, it was a great book and I recommend it. Maybe I missed something. I really enjoyed this book and read through it quite quickly.The author is very honest and you really get a sense of what her life was like through her childhood years. I feel she held nothing back and completely put her life out their for us all to read about.The only thing I don't understand about the book is the title.

The author sounds like a nice lady but the pacing and whispery tone make it very difficult to listen without feeling drowsy. The story is compelling - maybe - didn't make it to the end. I might try the written version to see if the pacing goes better with that format. Perhaps she should have been a hypnotist. But the story telling is sleep inducing. I literally had to switch from it to top 40 radio to stay awake on the drive home.

I was enthralled from the get-go and read it like how most read "Harry Potter." 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 just impressed by the whole book. This was really good- for a memoir, it read just like a novel. quite excellent. It was very emotional, and just. 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.

The superstition and narrow-mindedness of her Catholicism as practiced by her family and school is almost a character in the book. 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. This girl needed therapy to help her resolve her demons and I hope she got it. All in all an engaging book but one left with unanswered questions that would have made it more satisfying. 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.