A review by jenmkin
The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell

5.0

Every time I return to this book, I love it more. It’s so simple and yet so rich. The themes of connection and communication are woven artfully throughout, coming across a little differently for each character. I love the treatment of memory, and the contrast between the boy not being able to remember the truth except for in dreams and the mermaid and the hunter choosing to create memories. And the idea that change and things being different gives us the chance to value everything more, that it is better to have to feel loss than to be blind to even the idea of grief is so lovely, and its expression in the text so well-considered. Also, I’ve never noticed the parallel between the mermaid early on saying “the land is so…so—“ and not being able to come up with the words to finish and the boy saying the same, but about the sea. I want to write an essay on this book titled “Let and Live Let”

Also, this book reminds me of Mary Oliver’s “Invitation,” and specifically of the lines that say:
it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world.

Anyway, forever grateful to Dan Bowman for assigning this in intro to creative writing; it changed me, 10/10 everyone should read it