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.