My Family and Other Animals (Macmillan Collector's Library)

I really enjoyed Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. The book is a fictional memoir of Durrell's family time on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s published in 1956. In the book, Gerry is a late pre-teenager boy of around 10 years ago. Gerry loved natural history and collected different animals from around Corfu, which he brought home and unintentionally terrorized his family with animals from water snakes to magpies and other animals. Gerry explored the wildlife of Corfu including insects in the backyard of the three houses in which the family lives. Gerry befriends several Greeks who live on the island. Gerry learns the Greek language (26). Gerry’s widowed mother, Louisa Durrell enjoyed cooking and gardening (22). Gerry’s oldest brother, Lawrence “Larry” is a writer who is constantly bothered by different family members when he is not bothering the family himself. Gerry’s older brother, Leslie, is obsessed with guns and hunting. Margo enjoys sunbathing and boys (22). Other important characters are the following: Spiro Hakiaopulos, a Greek taxi driver who speaks English, who Gerald writes that Spiro “like a great, brown, ugly angel he watched over us as tenderly as though we were slightly weak-minded children” (20). Jerry’s friend and later Durrell's family friend, Doctor Theodore Stephanides who Gerald writes was “an expert on practically everything” and “an eccentric nature-lover” (58-59). Lugaretzia, Durrell’s maid, is a hypochondriac as a hobby (84). Gerry’s fourth tutor was an eccentric English national named Mr. Kralefsky who loves birds and views himself as a knight in a courtly romance story (213). Along with Spiro, Theodore, Lugaretzia, and Mr. Kralefsky, there are many memorable other characters as well in My Family and Other Animals. I really enjoyed Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.