Name All the Animals is a nicely done memoir about a girl whose brother dies when she is a young teen. The book focuses on how she and her family cope (or don't cope) with the death as well as Alison's first love. A love that turns out to be illicit.

This book was very close to a four star book for me. It starts slowly and then gathers terrific momentum. I did feel I had extra interest in the story though as it takes place in my town of Rochester, NY, and references quite a few institutions and locations that I'm familiar with.

The story of Alison's first love is really more of a subplot, but it is the part of the book that I found to be most engaging. I don't want to spoil the story, but Alison's love is such that she feels the need to hide it from family and friends, and she did a great job of evoking the pain that caused her (as well as the increased desire).

The rest of the story is framed around her brother's death, and shows the impact of losing a child on her parents as well as the potential impacts of death on faith. Since I am not religious, I found it harder to relate to this part of the book. Also, some of Alison's anecdotes about her life after her brother died are interesting and made sense to me. But some of her stories seemed overblown - - as if there was a big thought in there somewhere, but I just wasn't "getting it".

All in all though, I read the whole book in three days and enjoyed it throughout. I have a funny feeling that if I hadn't read it RIGHT after The Book Thief, I'd have given it the 4 stars it probably deserves. ( )

This memoir by Alison Smith is centered, for the most part, on the summer of her 15th years. On a beautiful August morning Alison and her parents were awakened by the knock of a policeman at the door; he had come to tell the family that 18 year old Roy, Alison’s beloved older brother, had been killed in an automobile accident. Alison and Roy had been nearly inseparable growing up, so much so that their parents called them by one name “Alroy”. Now, Alison is left to face her future without the protection of her brother and finds, not surprisingly, that her parents have become overly protective of her. The strict Catholic high school she attends only adds to her feelings of being smothered and she begins to rebel in small ways. When Alison falls in love for the first time everything changes. She has someone to confide in and someone to rely on when she needs to break free of her parent’s constant supervision but not everyone is pleased with Alison’s choice of friends.

This book was written with amazing honesty and it is just heart-breaking to read of Alison and her family trying to cope with Roy’s death. Reading of Alison saving food from her dinner plate and taking it outside to Alroy’s tree house in case Roy should return and be hungry is so sad. For years Alison was treated with kid gloves because she was the girl whose brother died and she must not be upset. Although the book was good I found it extremely depressing and hopeless.
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A very touching, loving memoir of a girl's struggle of life after the unexpected death of her brother and the story of her first love, a highly controversial one in her religious family & school.

At times, I found Alison Smith to be infuriating in her writing style. I can't explain exactly what set me off, I was just rubbed the wrong way. Such a tiny, almost insignificant problem though. Overall, this story was a unique coming-of-age tale intertwined with grief. Grief in the loss of her brother, grief in the heart-breaking first love she could not make work.

It covers eating disorders, tests of her personal faith [of which she lacks] and of her parents seemingly impenetrable faith and the undercurrent of their grief-stricken marriage.


Favorite Quotes:

1) “Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him.”

2) "I could not be anything other than the-girl-whose-brother-died."

3) "Grief can blind you; it pulls loose the seam of memory. It weakens your senses."

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Alison Smith and her brother, Roy, were as close as siblings can be when they were children. Suddenly, at eighteen, Roy is killed in a terrible automobile accident. His loss to the family is like an enormous black hole, sucking all the other members of the family into never-never land. This is the first book I've ever received from a book publisher and I was terrified I would hate it and have to pan it. (sigh of relief) Not a chance here. Alison Smith is an excellent storyteller, with a perfect sense of where to start and where to stop and what details to include. In addition, Smith has a compelling story to tell. Recommended. ( )

Too much angst, too dysfunctional for my taste. I look to books to enlighten, educate or entertain...none of these apply. ( )