Name All the Animals: A Memoir » (Reprint)

A touching, triumphant memoir that's drawn comparisons to Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones, Name All the Animals marks the promising debut of Alison Smith.

"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 work 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 backyard 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.

The New York Times

Roy remains real throughout the book, invoked at well-chosen intervals through memory and through his sister's acts of devotion. (She saves food for him. She regards even his worn-out running shoes with tenderness and reverence.) And the idea of punishment for her transgressions is equally substantial, giving the reader a sense of how much was at stake for her as she tried to regain her bearings. "Hell was a real place for us, as real as the next neighborhood," she writes. "In our insular Catholic world, hell practically had its own ZIP code." — Janet Maslin