Name All the Animals Response #2

The author, Alison Smith, makes the characters real by using people she actually knew in her life, since this is a memoir. The character, Sister Agnes James, is my favorite so far. She is so detailed, with her spunky attitude and the way her appearance is explained. I absolutely love the line "Her fine hair floated in a wild nest of curls." Little lines like that make the characters more realistic to me, easy to imagine in my mind. The things that Sister Agnes says, about the infirmary being a jailhouse, or nicknaming the switchboard girls, make her all the more an interesting character. In Italy, I met a bunch of elderly nuns since we stayed in a convent that they rented out as a hotel. Sister Agnes is exactly like them, so I can really relate to Al's feelings when she is around her. Except, Al can understand Sister Agnes, the nuns in Italy only spoke Italian. Alison Smith is doing an amazing job with her characters; they are all very deep, with lots of emotional layers that we discover very slowly.

With the characters of mother and father, you are really only introduced to this depressed side of the adults. As the story goes on, and the track team comes to the house to visit (Roy ran on the track team at McQuaid) you start to see them smiling, and acting like they did before Roy passed away in the car accident. Al's parents were only laughing and smiling when the track team came by, since they were reminded of their son. You can see how they used to be happy-go-lucky, and so supportive of their son and Al. That took a long time to discover, their happier attitudes during happier times. 

The way that her characters are developed make the book much more interesting, since if they were very shallow, the story wouldn't be interesting. It is a slow story mostly about emotions, and how the characters get over the death of a loved one. If the characters weren't explored deeply, then it would be EXTREMELY boring, with bland conversations about, "oh, yeah, my brother died." No scenes where girls ask Al to talk to talk to Roy with the Ouija Board, and she thinks to herself how she actually does want to see if she can contact Roy. Even those scenes are interesting, because they explore the thoughts of the characters.