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Initial Impression


They Cage the Animals at Night is a prose written by Jennings Micheal Burch. At the age of eight, he was put into a foster home by his sickly mother. He stayed at 32 foster homes in the span of five years therefore he never had the chance to make a friend. During this time, as one can imagine, he suffered from loneliness. This memoir shows his painful search for love. When I first picked up this book, I was unsure whether or not I should read it. Looking over the back cover, I saw comments that included terms such as “heart wrenching” and “shattering” and concluded that this book would be a tear- jerker. I find displeasure in reading doleful books such as this because I always cry a great deal and therefore, refuse to keep reading the rest of the story. I will however in this case, force myself to continue reading this memoir because although I know it will be sad, I expect that this novel will be very commendable and have a happy ending as well. The comments also state that this book is “powerful” and “gripping”. I feel that reading this will reveal to me how some foster children are treated. The situation has always felt detached somehow from me but it does affect everyone. Reading this will help me realize what they are going through and maybe somehow I can help. I just have a feeling that I will enjoy reading this. I have not read a memoir in so long and I feel that it is best I read one that many people have praised.

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Connections

          The piece of work I feel connects well to  the memoir, They Cage the Animals at Night   by Jennings Michael Burch, is the song Time We Had by The Mother Hips. The tone is calm and hopeful matching Jennings’s inner emotions at the beginning and towards the end of the novel. The memoir itself although written in a child-like tone, also portrays a hopeful and struggling expression.             Throughout the novel, Jennings runs away many times from the foster homes he is forced to stay at. Instead of going to where his family is although the location is always changing, he runs to the zoo, which becomes his new home. This matches the lyrics “on the way home” in the song. Another time Jennings is running away, he walks through a graveyard in the dead of night attempting to cross the Whitestone Bridge. As he walks through, a man, acting as a ghost frightens him out of the graveyard, go...
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Title Significance

              In the first home that Jennings is taken to named Home of the Angels, he is lonely, scared and confused. The nuns who run the place are strict and they hit him. Then, one night his new friend, Mark, takes him to line that is forming behind a desk. Sister Clair, Jennings's favorite nun, comes, unlocks a cabinet and hands out stuff animals to the eager children waiting in line. Jennings is handed a fuzzy dog with floppy ears and immediately loves him. When Jennings wakes up, he is mortified to see that his fuzzy companion, named Doggie, has gone missing. When Mark calms him and tells him that the nuns take them away at night, Jennings asks why. Mark heatedly replies, "It's the rules! They cage the animals at night!"(26). This saying or theme is constantly repeated throughout this memoir: "it was the first time Doggie was ever away from his cage and out of the home"(41). The title,  They Cage the Animals at Night , has a much deepe...
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Final Impression

        They Cage the Animal at Night   by Jennings Michael Burch is a beautiful story. From the first page, I was swept into Jennings’s world where the theme of loss is constantly repeated. The first- person perspective the author takes in writing this memoir demonstrates his innocence, sorrow, and confusion throughout the plot, beginning when his mother leaves him in the Home of the Angels. From there, it seems everything and everyone Jennings loves goes away: “‘So many people I liked have come and gone in my life… I made the mistake once of forgetting it could all end tomorrow, and I paid for it… it ended, and it hurt twice as much’”(245). Jennings, in this way, never learned what love was. He struggled to comprehend the meaning after being told by his dying brother, Jerome and his friend, Sal. Another beautiful aspect of this memoir, are the life lessons taught to Jennings. Dealing with so much pain could have shattered his soul, but with the advice and teac...
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