Barn 8

 Barn 8

By Deb Olin Unferth

To be clear, this book was given to me as something of a joke. It arrived near by birthday from my brother as a reference to the chickens we have been keeping -- and losing to local wildlife -- since the fall. He also gave me a set of toy construction equipment to assuage my yen for a mini excavator, with which I could no doubt create excellent mountain biking trails. So I wasn't expecting much. Then again, the cover was pretty great.

The book is about, well, chickens. Specifically: egg layers caught in our pretty awful industrial farming system. It is also about the humans who want to end this system. One of them turns out to be Janey, who arrives in the midwest at the tail end of her high school career after learning that her mother, who had claimed not to know who her father was, very much did know who Janey's father was. So Janey decided to go visit him. He's a bit of a...letdown. Even more so when, just as Janey is about to return home to New York City, Janey's mother dies in a car accident. Leaving Janey to spend the rest of her high school year in Iowa. Janey thereafter distinguishes herself from "old" Janey and is in many ways her opposite. Gone are her dreams of attending college or of making anything of herself whatsoever. She seems to have lost all of her old ambition. Until.

She takes a job as an inspector of factory farms. She gets it because her supervisor, Cleveland, was once babysat by Janey's mother, who looms large in her mind. Cleveland also happens to be having something of a career crisis. She finds herself stealing chickens from farms and leaving them on the doorstep of the local anti-ag organization. When Janey learns of this, inspiration strikes and they hatch a plan to remove about a million birds from a local factory farm. This brings in a number of other characters, including Annabelle, a former activist who left the movement for untold reasons, and Dill, her former co-conspirator who also seems washed up. Together, they pull together hundreds of volunteers to carry out the mission, which does not go well. Blame it on barn 8. In between all this, the author waxes poetic about the state of the earth and the unsung marvels of the ordinary chicken.

All told, it wasn't a bad read. It was pretty funny in places. But it seemed to take forever to get to the action. And the whole book was dripping with so much foreshadowing that actually learning about that action felt anti-climactic. But -- chickens!