COOP: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Michael Perry
Harper
Memoir
ISBN: 9780061240430
Michael Perry's new farm was not much like the one he grew up on. It didn't have sheep or cows --- in fact, it had no animals at all. It lacked the noise of a big family; there was just Perry and his wife, Anneliese, and young daughter Amy. But this small family had dreams of free-range chickens, a bountiful garden and fat pigs, and set out to make their newly acquired patch of Wisconsin land home. Perry chronicles their first year on the farm in his latest book, COOP.
In the course of the year, as they settled in to farm life, something Perry and his wife are both familiar with, the family finds small joys in watching chickens and enormous joys in the birth of their baby daughter. They suffer the loss of family members and dear friends, and work hard in homeschooling Amy, raising two pigs and maintaining the land. All the while Perry still works as a freelance writer, a job that takes him away from home more often than he'd like.
As much as Perry is writing about trying to build a home for his growing family and create a certain level of sustainability and self-sufficiency, he is also writing about his childhood and the Wisconsin farm that he himself lived on growing up. Raised by caring and open-hearted parents who were members of a little known, religiously conservative Protestant group, Perry was surrounded by siblings and family friends, and was expected to work hard on the farm. He and his wife hope to instill much of his parents’ wisdom in their daughters, but they also have their own strong ideas about family and farming.
In attempting to find a balance between the two worldviews, Perry shares his thoughts, his successes (raising two healthy pigs for slaughter) and failures (a 50% chicken mortality rate), his moments of pride and his storms of frustration. While his life is not a typical middle-class existence, his hopes, fears, exasperations and jokes will resonate with readers from all different backgrounds.
Perry’s memories of his parents, brothers, sisters and the foster children who lived with them are written with honesty and kindness. These are the same qualities that characterize his writing overall. From livestock auctions to home births, from coop building to funerals, Perry shines when documenting the everyday and has a talent for making the everyday extraordinary. His style is humorous but sometimes melancholy, bold and self-deprecating.
Though sometimes a bit repetitive and prone to too much skipping about in time, COOP is a fun and compelling read. Perry is a likable host and guide to mid-western sensibility and the intricacies and rhythms of rural life. In the first pages, he writes, “[W]e are going rural in the hope that we might become more self-sufficient in terms of firewood, an expanded garden, and perhaps a pair of pigs.” But quickly after reading this, it becomes obvious that Perry and his family are embarking on a grander journey. They are exploring the concept of roots, literally and figuratively: examining the meaning of home, family and community with their hands in the soil tending to other kinds of growing things.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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