Reviews

The Dictionary of Animal Languages by Heidi Sopinka

rubius_pepperwood's review against another edition

challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

ridgewaygirl's review against another edition

3.0

Ivory Frame is an elderly woman who has been working for decades on The Dictionary of Animal Languages, a compendium of the various noises animals make to communicate, from the clicking of insects to bird songs to the howls of wolves. Ivory has had an eventful life, attending art school in Paris, where she falls in love with another artist until the Second Word War drives them apart. She finds her true calling with the dictionary, and even though she is in her nineties, she continues to work on it.

This is an odd novel about a strong and determined woman. Heidi Sopinka tells the story from a very close first person, so much that there is no clear way to tell the difference between what Ivory is thinking and what she is saying aloud. The novel is set in two time frames; her life in France and her years after the war, as she finds her vocation. Sopinka's prose is not written with clarity in mind, there's a ornate and poetic feel to the writing that I found got in the way more than it gave greater illumination to the story. The best part of the novel was the character of Lev, a Tortured Artist with a truly fascinating and harrowing past in Ukraine and while he is the great love of Ivory's life, there are many hints that she's just the next girl in a sequence that exists somewhere below his art. There was a lot interesting going on and I wanted to like it more than I did. In the end, it was just too opaquely written and the central conflict shouldn't even exist, the solution being so obvious and predictable.

schray32's review against another edition

4.0

3.5 stars... this is sort of all over the place, but the ideas about life, sounds, death, love have some brilliant moments.

tensy's review against another edition

2.0

This is one of those books where the author is in love with writing pithy phrases that frankly sometimes left me totally befuddled and with the lack of quotation marks (once again a young writer with this penchant, ugh!) in conversations and frequent jumps in time, the plot didn't seem to go anywhere. I thought the character of Ivory Frame was interesting, but not enough to keep on reading. Gave up at p. 120. I did read the last few chapters and finally some semblance of a plot and poignant writing, but it just didn't save the previous chapters.

kscaldwell's review against another edition

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

bookherd's review against another edition

3.0

Ivory Frame (yes, that's her name) is a young woman estranged from her family and enrolled in an art conservatory in Paris between the world wars. She is also an elderly biologist who has spent her adult life recording the languages of animals with the understanding that their existence is threatened by human encroachment and climate change. We get her story alternating in the present and the past. The Ivory of the present is shaken to receive a letter telling her she has a granddaughter, because she apparently has no child of her own. The book sets out to give us the context and the backstory for this letter, although Ivory's story meanders quite a bit in the process. She has a difficult love affair in her past, and a sympathetic assistant in the present, and the events and emotions seem to take place on an operatic level. I am generally one who appreciates melodrama, but I think it may be a bit overdone in this book. Still, there is a lot going on in The Dictionary of Animal Languages with ideas about the purpose of art, and the difference between art and science, or art and language. This is a rich book and I am glad I read it.

lightfoxing's review against another edition

4.0

Breathtaking prose, a charming and relatable main character in Ivory Frame, and a tenderly drawn, realistic love story that ends in a way that the reader won't come to expect from this type of novel. Heidi Sopinka is a generous author, giving the reader delicious vocabulary to savour, with sentences that sit like a pearl in your mouth, all while hinting at a plot that has a resolution one can't come close to expecting - in fact, there's little resolution at all. The Dictionary of Animal Languages works within a framework that has no obvious beginning or ending in order to tell a story that doesn't quite stand up on its own, and the two work perfectly together to provide a very non-cliched book. I was absolutely delighted by it, but disappointed in the cover - I felt it was very misleading, and almost passed over it because I thought it looked like just another schlocky romance set in World War II. I'm glad I picked it up, because it was phenomenal. Sopinka has a masterful command of language, and a gentle understanding of the breadth of the human experience.

nicolaspratt's review against another edition

4.0

Different, complex, touching. Sopinka does an excellent job of telling a "love story" in a way that the reader feels that they are living the memories rather than simply being an outside observer. Following the whole life-story of an intelligent and driven woman, her pains and sorrows, her loves and fears, creates a world that is painfully familiar and refreshingly comforting. People go through pain, and with the right world around them can and will grow and learn from it.

cami19's review against another edition

emotional slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

mirandaleighhhh's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

A Dictionary of Animal Languages is  beautifully and devastatingly written. It was a painful, it’s contents honestly gut-wrenching, but also contained a wisdom that made me reflect on my own life, and think of my own mortality. I loved the portions of the book that discussed sound and nature. 

I have to admit that it was sometimes difficult to understand, particularly in that it’s not always clear whether a conversation is actually happening, or whether it’s happening in our main characters head, though that might have been on purpose. But I found that that coupled with the lack of punctuation made it difficult to read at times. It had a slow start. Overall worth the read!