How To Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery

I just found out that Sy Montgomery is known as a children's book author as well as a naturalist/memoirist.  I started the book thinking that it was about animals but it really is a memoir of family for the author.
Let's do the good news first.  This woman's heart is bursting with love that encompasses almost everything that is alive.  She starts with a dog in childhood who she says raised her, and she goes on to show and tell about animals that she has lived with, loved near, and loved from afar or intermittently over her lifetime.  The sad news is that her childhood dog raised her emotionally because her parents did not.  There is an undercurrent of abuse in her childhood at the hands of an alcoholic mother and an authoritarian father that is heartbreaking.  There is not a hint of anger related to her childhood, just relief that she escaped, that the husband her parents disowned her over not only loves her but also gets her, and how relationships with non-humans can be healing for traumatized people.  So while there are some good stories in here, that is the one that I walked away with.