A review by lightfoxing
The Dictionary of Animal Languages by Heidi Sopinka

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.