Reviewed by S.M. Stevens
Posted on: February 10, 2026
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Reading Don’t Look in the Freezer is like sitting down with a friend in front of a roaring fire and trading your best, funniest, and most poignant pet stories.
I consider myself the perfect reader for this book as my childhood dream was to be a veterinarian (until high school chemistry dissuaded me from a medical career!), and I am a hard-core animal advocate and lover. But anyone who enjoys funny, heartwarming stories will appreciate this book.
Eddington writes crisply with clarity, feeling, and humor, often self-deprecating. She was a vet’s wife, not the vet herself, so in-depth medical descriptions and case studies are not in abundance, which many readers will probably appreciate. We do get occasional, brief references to bodily fluids of every kind imaginable, but for the most part the stories are about the challenges inherent in the illness or injury, the treatment, and dealing with the clients—both human and other animals.
The author offers up one entertaining anecdote after another, framed by her husband Jim’s decades-long career with some early family history mixed in. The anecdotes feature animals treated by Jim’s veterinary hospital, the staff who worked there and became family, and the clients who made their days rewarding or tiresome. So while this book has plenty of animal-focused stories to keep a fanatic like me engaged, it also effectively tells the stories of the people in and around the edges of the veterinary world, as well as of people in the author’s family.
The well-paced memoir also conveys Jim’s philosophy and approach to his work, their shared philosophy toward animals, stories of her family’s own pets, and how she and Jim formed an indomitable team from the time they married in their twenties until Jim retired in his sixties.
Don’t Look in the Freezer is a love letter to Eddington’s husband, and a love letter to all the veterinarians who work tirelessly to help our feathered and furry friends. Best of all, the stories within will make you smile and laugh, many times over. (I did catch a few typos, but my review copy was an ARC so these will likely have been corrected before publication.)
