An earnest, surprisingly philosophical memoir of farming and family that doesn't get preachy or romanticize living off the land. Perry describes his wife's home birth of their daughter, construction of various chicken containment units and the care and feeding of pigs with a sweetly self-deprecating sense of humor. He also describes his childhood filled with foster and adopted siblings and his upbringing in a small, non-mainstream Christian sect, looking back with an adult respect for the solid foundation it gave him. Never maudlin or snarky, it's the story of a basically well-adjusted person adjusting to a new set of circumstances in his life.

Michael Perry is a gifted writer. His stories are deeply personal yet universal in their truths. He writes with an understated eloquence that belies his rural settings and topics. One of the rare authors who can make me laugh out loud on one page and bring a tear to my eye on the next page.

Highly recommended and definitely a candidate for my favorite book of 2016.

During construction, while the walls had yet to be enclosed, my sister Suzy was playing farmer, and my brother Jed was her cow. In need of a stanchion, Suzy had Jed stick his head in the gap between two studs. Later we were all seated at the dinner table when Mom noticed Jed was missing. “Oh,” said Suzy nonchalantly, “he’s in the milk house.” And so we found him, on hands and knees with his head jammed between a pair of two-by-fours. Having pushed his way in, he couldn’t back out. Dad levered the studs apart and freed him. I was always confused when city kids asked us how we had fun without a television. (40)

Farming is one of those things I can file under Weird Reading Interests That Have Nothing to Do with My Own Life. Perry's story is multilayered: a contemporary story of small-scale hobby farming, childhood stories of growing up on a much larger farm, ruminations on parenting from both the perspective of a parent and the perspective of a now-grown child, and a framework of the building of, yes, a chicken coop.

It's by any standard a good book (thoughtful, detailed, well paced, etc. etc. etc.), but for some reason I stalled out just past the halfway point, and I had to take the rest in bite-sized reads. That might be a matter of the relaxed pace of the book, or it might just be where my reading-head is at the moment. There's some lovely reflection throughout the work, though, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a sort of slice-of-life story, or for light tales of farm work with more complex family stories underpinning them.

Oh, and note to self: never raise pigs.

I really loved this memoir about the author's experience during his first year of farming. But it's about so much more than farming. I just loved it. My full review will be up on my blog tomorrow (June 10.)

I never keep track of where my recommendations come from and my to-read list is, well, I won't finish it in this lifetime. So I have no idea why I picked this book up. It's reasonable to guess, however, that it's because it is a sort of modern back-to-the-land fumbling memoir of the author, his wife, their young daughter and the baby-on-the-way moving out of the city to an old family farm. It's not a how-to book. It's a memoir, and his farming experiences are mostly just context for Perry's meander down memory lane. This book is really about family and rural America. It's about the author's experiences in a small town, growing up on a farm himself, being part of a large family, his parents taking on a lengthy parade of special needs foster kids, being raised in a secretive fundamentalist Christian sect (which is weird, but not evil like it sounds), the community that surrounds all those going-on's of life, and balancing work, family, and farm. This book took me way too long to get through. My initial goal was to finish it in a week, but it dragged into two and then two and now it's taken me a full week to write the review.

The slaughter of the pigs and meat birds is less graphic and more poetic than that in Farm City, but the sentiments are the same - pigs are smart, challenging, and funny, but a lot more work than expected and the fresh bacon is unbelievable. I will not raise pigs in my backyard, though! Perry has a lot of guilt about the balance of his career and his farm's workload, and he really struggles with going on the road for a book tour and leaving his wife alone with two kids to care for, homeschooling, and a farm that needs tending. His wife is very capable, a farm girl herself, and manages just fine without him thank you very much. The idea to go back to the farm was a shared dream, the animals were his project, and the crops were almost entirely hers. This was a little disappointing to me, since the end result is that the book has not much about the plants, and plants are the most interesting things to me. The chicken stories, however, are lovely. Raising the chicks into ugly pullets into handsome hens, and his daughter's love for the most "special" chicken, the heartbreak when a laying hen passes away, and all of the love and loss and laughter of having laying hens and their strong personalities around - these are eggs-actly why I read these kinds of books, man.

When I settled down with this book, it was easy to read 100 pages quickly, but I had a hard time getting excited about setting aside the time, and that is the crux of this book for me. It was really good to read, but hard to get fired up about meandering Small Town / Rural Life prose. Perry's writing style is charming and earnest. His anecdotes and meditations are sincere and thoughtful. His love for his daughters touches my secret parenthood nerve. When he talks about his father in those dry, secret ways that only the best kind of man can talk about loving his daddy, my heart clenches up in my throat. There is something about the quiet sentimental emotional life of rural masculinity that I find so charming, and in Coop, it's paired with a modern man's sense of intellectualism and responsibility.

I agree with the reviewers who have said this is not a 'man, the country life is perfect and pristine' memoir. Mistakes are made, regrets are accumulated, and hard questions are posed without always being answered - and that is real life, which I truly appreciate in a memoir. While I did not grow up on a farm, for most of my school-aged years I lived in a farming community, and my parents had a substantial vegetable garden. The sections about the dairy farming took me back to when we got our milk (and government cheese) from the Moll's dairy farm [whose barn my parents painted during a 2-3 week stretch one summer] - the smells, the sounds, it all resonated and took me back to my late single-digit years. I enjoyed the back and forth of humor with poignancy, and I really liked Perry's care in his descriptions. I will be putting his other books into my queue.

Just the kind of book I like to read in springtime. And the kind of homestead I envy.

Michael Perry is pretty great. What is so amazing is not the events of his stories or any revelations he makes in the telling of the story but simply his writing. perry can turn a story I don't actually much care about or sympathize with into something that is a joy to read. I grew up in South Eastern Wisconsin, so the stories of which he writes are mildly familiar in setting or basic idea, but don't know of anyone else who could put so much detail into seemingly mundane events and observations.
That being said, not all of the events or remembrances of his books are mundane--some are so unusual or incredible, snuck in amongst daily life, to make me wonder if this amazing stuff happens all around us all the time and most of us are just not Michale Perry enough to recognize them when they happen.

Incidentally, it was interesting to listen to Perry write as a new father. he talks often of leaving his wife in charge of everything when he has taken on too much. I suspect, in this respect, he is not much diffent from many new fathers.

Anyway, my review is far less. Interesting and rewarding. Sop reading it now and go get your hands on something written by Michael Perry. You wont regret it.

There were many things I liked about this book. Punching a cow, Mills as a doula, taking care of the surviving chickens were all hilarious. The sensitivity with which he discusses a family death and his naked admiration for his wife were both touching. But the organization of the book was lacking and it bothered me that he talked repeatedly about being more focused and a better husband without demonstrating in the book that he actually did do those things.