Dark and nostalgic. The stories are so well written and illustrated. Voltz really draws readers into the events, allowing them to sense the grief and emotions felt. This book portrays the sorrow of tragedy, and how death is inevitable.

An enjoyably written book. It deals with death but it's written in a heartwarming way. However, some of it did come of as a bit disjointed and rambly.

It says Teen & YA so I was hoping for more life in this memoir. I know we can't always spice up real life but it didn't feel as if had much movement. The illustrations and everything about it is adorable but it isn't meant for me.

This book.. it didn't make much sense to me, It felt as if the author was just rambling on about her memories and that- in combination with a very messy layout on my kindle app and missing letters- made reading it a little bit difficult. I don't really have anything to say about the book itself, other than that it was nice to be able to read about the love the author had for all the animals on the farm and her family.

I very much enjoyed this book. I'm always drawn to books about animals and this one doesn't disappoint. Some of the stories were humorous and some were sad but they all felt authentic. My only critique might be there was a sense of repetition after a while. Still, it was a pleasure to read.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Break out the tissues! I'm a big animal lover and this book really hit me hard. It's not often that I get the book feels in public but when an animal was hurt or died I just started to bawl! Some of these stories are sweet, some bittersweet, and some of these will rip your heart out and stomp all over it. There were gorgeous illustrations at the beginning of each chapter which I absolutely adored and it was a sweet homage to the animals in the book. From what I've seen on youtube the book is clothbound and a really beautiful green and it looks like it'd be nice on a coffee table.
If you want to cry and laugh and have your heart ripped out then you need this book!
Rating: 5 Stars!

Why did it take me so long to finish this... default of this being on my kindle... I forgot it was there. I picked it back up today and remembered why I loved it so much.

This book is about Beth and growing up on a farm as one of the youngest of 12 kids... her love of animals and her loss at losing them. It was the most unique memoir I’ve ever read. Her story is told through her animals. It was beautiful and funny and sad all at the same time. I would love to see a finished copy of this book. Because my kindle just can’t do the pictures justice.

I was looking forward to this book. As a lifelong animal lover and after seeing the amazing book cover, I was prepared to love this book. That [sadly] did not happen. The book did not fell like it was going anywhere. I kept waiting for some grand moment that never came. We wandered through and past many "shoebox funerals" and while none of them were bad—in fact, I greatly enjoyed the first few—I felt like I got the concept early on. The book rambled with no clear destination. I would recommend this book to you if you tend to get confused while reading books and forget whats going on. If you're someone who plans on reading it in one week, please let me know what you think because I just kept waiting for something (anything) to happen!

Shoebox Funeral is a collection of stories written by Elisabeth Voltz about her experience growing up on a farm in a large family. Told mostly through stories about animals she help take care of, Shoebox Funeral is a tale of growing up and experiencing the full spectrum that life has to offer.

Now this book wasn’t entirely for me. The topic didn’t hold my attention well but it was engaging. The stories were easy to follow. I really appreciated the variety of emotions on display. You experience the entire spectrum from joy to sadness and the macabre to humor and each emotion felt incredibly genuine. The ending of the book is particularly strong; focusing on who she is and what the farm means to her today because of the animals and stories she had just shared. It did a nice job of tying up the stories and making everything feel relevant. The pictures were also a nice touch.

Despite the believability, I didn’t connect to Elisabeth through any of the stories. We don’t share similar upbringings but I want to be drawn in enough that despite difference I would feel a connection; unfortunately that did not happen. The lack of relatability is likely due to, in part, to my interest level waning. The book wasn’t quite what I expected as I began, which is my own fault. However, there were quite a few stories that focused on the same type of animals and once I had gotten about three-quarters of the way through it was feeling a bit repetitive.

Regardless of my mixed feelings, this book was well written and incredibly honest, occasionally uncomfortably so. It truthfully shares personal experiences in an attempt to connect and reveal the importance of animals in our lives. If this topic interests you, I think the book is worth a read.

This is a beautifully written book which will be much appreciated by anyone who loves animals. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I feel now like I've been there because of the tender descriptive writing of the author. Before I read this, I didn't know anything about farm life, although I have a far-reaching love animals of all kinds. I had no idea that people would just drive by a farm and drop off unwanted or dying animals, and my heart ached through the stories of that kind. It is well worth the read, however. I feel more connected to my passion for animals now, and have received a wider world view as well.

This book was very good! I really enjoyed reading this book! The writing was very good, I like how the characters were written.

This book is beautifully written. It is full of short stories about a girl in a large family on big ol farm in Pennsylvania. It is also about her love of cats and kittens, and the many animals that came and went on the farm. Most of the stories are sad, but have beautiful illustrations. But overall I really enjoyed reading this book.
I received an ARC copy of this book from #NetGalley and I am leaving a voluntary, honest review.

Unfortunately, I am unable to read this book. The formatting issues that come along with the kindle format have been impossible to ignore.

I found this book pretty interesting. It was unlike anything I'd ever read before, which is always refreshing. I loved the addition of the photos at the end of the book as well and the narrative style.
So, while this wasn't a book that I fell in love with, it was ok. There were some good parts, others that were a bit slower but it was pretty good.

Before diving into the review, I would like to applaud the author for how clever the title is. I really think that it is clever and I somehow felt that I'm very stupid because it took me half of this book to realize why it is called "Shoebox Funeral".

It is always fun to read short stories focusing on a certain topic - which in this case is animals - so you can see how different perspective on a specific topic. It is fun and light but it would also gives you the difference between today's generation and the past generations. Not only that, you'll get to understand how people value the animals in their lives and how it became not just a part of it but as a very special part of it.

Being an animal lover and a pet owner, I can relate to the voices in the stories compiled in this book. Their love for their pets and the way they cared for them even though their life span is shorter than ours touched me.

SPOILER.
What I really like most, and probably my favorite out of all the stories in this book, is the one about those people living in a farm and how they only have enough to feed the animals that are useful to them and they are not allowed to have pets and yet, they hid it from their parents and when their parents saw how responsible they are with regards to taking good care of their pets, they finally let them keep it. It's something that I would always remember.

A young adult book by Elizabeth Voltz, from Animal Media Group, about growing up in a very large family on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. The memoir is a series of short vignettes about different animals who came and went (mostly went) during her life growing up.

I also grew up on a smallholding and I am very familiar with the widespread practice of people driving by and dumping no-longer-wanted animals (generally scared and confused, often with health or behavioral problems) and then driving off in a cloud of dust, 'problem' solved.

The book was well written and beautifully, quaintly illustrated by the author. Many of the stories are sad and the author's compassion and caring come through. The biggest takeaway for me from the book was how brutal and awful and often short life can be for vulnerable animals.

I was saddened reading this book (written from the young author's viewpoint through the lens of her adulthood) about how often animals in her world suffered and often died without professional care because it just wasn't feasible to take them to the veterinarian. There were some viewpoints with which I felt uncomfortable (she was excited about a new cat which came to the farm because it brought a different color pattern and genetics to the constant uncontrolled litters the cats produced). There were also passages which seemed very sad to me because they led directly to the unnecessary suffering of an animal in her care. (She refused to euthanize a terminally ill beloved pet because it was devastating to her, but the very ill animal eventually died alone in a snowstorm and wasn't found until the spring thaw).

I really do understand about the realities of living on a farm, and I've been there myself, perhaps that's why this book resonated so deeply with me. I just wish there had been more specific 'spay and neuter your pets and don't dump them at your local small farm' and less of 'this is how fuzzy/spot/kitty met their untimely end'.

Oddly enough, personal aside, I also grew up on a farm terrorized by my grandmother's goose, and though I was an only child (and always wanted a pack of siblings), my parents and grandparents were also mathematicians and physicists and my grandfather reminded me a lot of Elizabeth's description of her grandfather Voltz also :)

What a sweet, heartfelt book. I loved the stories about Elisabeth's life on her families farm and the different animals that appeared there. She would fall in love with them and even as a child, feel responsible for taking care of them and tried making their lives better. The drawings that appear in each chapter are adorable. By the end of the book I felt like I knew Elisabeth personally because of her relatable writing style.

Elizabeth Sholtz grew up on a farm with nine other siblings. Shoebox funeral is a unique collection of short memoirs that revolve around the deaths of much beloved pets on her family farm.

I actually enjoyed this more than I thought I would. I thought it was a unique way to present memoirs, as I feel pets and the animals we grow up with can often say a lot about the people they belong to. The illustrations that are scattered throughout are beautiful too. The memoirs themselves are also very well written. However, after a while I did start to get bogged down in all these animals deaths. It wasn't a light read, and some of the tales were interesting enough to keep me entertained.

Beth's love for animals captured my heart. I read this story in one sitting and it had be feeling warm and fuzzy,to my heart aching for the loss of her friends. Beautiful.

Elizabeth Voltz grew up on a farm in Wolf Creek. She is one of ten kids. She is the second youngest. She often made her own fun by playing with the animals on the farm, particularly the cats. However, this also meant she had to bury her beloved friends starting from a young age. This memoir tells of her experiences with these animals.

I could relate to a lot of what she talked about in regards to the cats. She distinguished between the house cats and the barn cats. At my house, we feed a lot of stray cats. I like to play with some of the kittens and they all have names. I understood the emotional attachment she had with them, even when they weren't really her pets. Often this attachment leads to heartbreak when they get sick or injured beyond recovery.

This is a well written book. I enjoyed a lot of it, but the heartbreaking stories of having to bury pets was too much for me. I've had to do that before and it dredged up too many unhappy memories. This is a good book, but too emotional for me.

This review will be posted on my blog on May 21, 2017.