June 17, 2024
In this idyllic ode to the pastoral life, Young (The Secret Life of Cows) reflects on the quirks and rewards of working her family’s organic farm in England. Drawn from Young’s diary entries, the episodic chapters capture the rhythms of her day-to-day life. She recounts chasing after rogue sheep, bottle-feeding lambs whose mothers can’t produce enough milk, and troubleshooting ways to prevent foxes from entering the turkey enclosure, among other activities. Animals “are as individual as we are,” she contends, describing how some mother cows are unperturbed if their calves don’t follow them into the barn for the night while others “go pretty mad” until they’re reunited. Elsewhere, Young describes how a particularly determined hen laid an egg in Young’s kitchen despite efforts to usher the chicken outside, how Young and her partner aided a cow struggling to give birth to twins, and how a herd of sheep once allowed a fox cub to take refuge in their shed during a storm. The meditative, low-stakes stories have a soothing effect, and the evocative prose finds beauty in Young’s workaday routines (“The rain-soaked fields create a percussive squelch under your feet and you can hear and feel a rhythmic harmony as you walk, picked up by the metronomic tap of your zipper pull”). It’s an appealing slice of country life.
June 15, 2024
A British organic farmer and bestselling author offers evocative vignettes about daily life on her farm in the Cotswolds. As Young, the author of The Secret Life of Cows, recounts, farming and a love of farm animals are in her blood. Both her maternal grandfather and her father had been farmers, and when her mother saw her father's kindness toward cows, "she decided there and then that she would marry him." As the author approached 50, at the suggestion of a journalist doing research into organic foods, she decided to keep a journal about the "daily farm events" at the heart of the stories in this volume. Though not ordered according to any thematic or temporal schemas, the pieces are united by the undivided, always affectionate attention Young gives to her world. In one essay, she contrasts the chaos of the 2008 financial meltdown with musings, based on passages from The Merchant of Venice, about the power of music on animals and memories of her father playing classical music for the cows he milked. Nature and its simple joys reign supreme throughout this charming text, regardless of whether Young is reflecting on the seasons or the distinctive personalities and moods of cows ("every single one has her own particular set of likes and dislikes"). Though the author takes no political stance on animal rights, she makes it clear that you can tell a lot about a person's character by how they treat animals. "Under the guise of saving species," she writes, "humans create (horrific) zoos and justify horrendous expeditions to chase, terrify, sedate, capture and control wild creatures," and many domesticated animals live in stressed bodies that, when eaten, do not contribute positively to human health. Warmhearted and charming, Young's essays offer a gentle country antidote to the tumult of contemporary life. A delightful modern-day pastoral.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
June 21, 2024
Organic farmer Young (The Secret Life of Cows) describes here some of her earliest memories, of snow on the Clapton-on-the-Hill farm her grandfather rented in Gloucestershire County, England. Because the farm was cut off from the outside world, Young and her brother were not around other children, so their father allowed them to keep two lambs inside their home. They were meant to view the sheep as livestock, not pets, but that turned out to be impossible. Young's life on a remote farm, with lots of work to do, caring for animals in extreme and sometimes dangerous weather and situations, caused her to be mindful and observant; she also learned great compassion from her sheep, as she writes here. For example, on her own Kite's-Nest Farm on a very rainy night, she went up the hill with a bundle of hay on her back to feed her herd. She found the sheep happily huddled in one corner of their shed, nurturing a fox cub who had sought shelter there. VERDICT This book is a must-read for those who admire and appreciate organic livestock farms and the goods they produce. It also movingly demonstrates how to persevere through difficult times.--Laura Ellis
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.