Feed My Dear Dogs

This novel has it all--love, laughter and loss (don't want to say too much because it would be like giving away the end of a movie). I was especially surprised by the funny descriptions of nuns that made me laugh out loud. I don' t know if that's what the author intended, but that's what happened. Novel runs a little long but I blame that on the editor. Worth the effort.

This second novel by Emma Richler is a delightful reading experience. The narrator, Jemima Weiss, describes home and school life as the middle child in a family of five. The siblings closest in age to her take on very well-developed personalities, while the eldest and youngest don't, although the youngest serves an important role as the child in peril. There is very little action outside of a close-knit family life and life at convent schools. It is still unclear to me why the girls are going to convent school in both London and Montreal, while the boys receive a complete Jewish education. This fact, however, puts Jemima at odds with the nuns, and even to her younger sister, while makes her dependent on her brother for insight into Judaism. The portrait of the father, a fictionalized version of Mordecai Richler, of course, is rather unflattering. Coarseness and insecurity seem to define him, yet there is clear affection in both directions for the children. Jemima appears to be complaining too, about her role in organizing the children, yet not receiving much of her parents' attention. Humor saves this novel from the closed-in feeling of the Weiss household and convents, but I wished that the characters would get out more. Musings about the stars and Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic Expedition are woven in, to good effect. It puts a, very Canadian, survival theme into a novel that lacks much sense of place, despite being set in two of the most distinctive cities in the world. Ms Richler evidently sees her family's survival as relating to the survival in the ice and cold of Antarctica. Montreal may be cold in the winter, but there are no ice floes and there is plenty of shopping!