Funny that I never read this book before because it was famous in my family growing up. It was my mother's favorite book and she often spoke about how wonderful it was. As a kid I'd seen the film but I had no interest at that time in reading a book about a woman living on a chicken farm.
But I found a copy at an estate sale (and later the same month a family member gave me another) so I read it and was thunderstruck. It was like opening a page and hearing my mother's voice.
MacDonald was a satirist, she reminded my very much of Mark Twain. So slyly sardonic, so humorous and so biting. I realized instantly what a huge impact MacDonald had on my mother in developing her writing style.
In a nutshell, the story is a memoir covering the period in the late 1920s when as a newlywed she lived on a chicken farm in a remote part of the Olympic Peninsula. As a city girl, you can guess the rest.
I loved her style, her wit, her self-deprecation. Even her descriptions of the natural world all around her were wonderful. Like many satirists, especially of a different era, she is harsh is her judgements of others, with cutting and ofttimes racist descriptions of some of the locals. But if you can get past that and understand it is a product of the time, it is a wonderful book.
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