Description de l’éditeur
'Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler will devour it.' - Daily Mirror
Darkly witty, deeply moving – Jackie Polzin's Brood is a startlingly original debut novel about motherhood, marriage and grief, full of sorrow, joy and unrelenting hope.
Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails – and all the while struggling to confront her own recent loss. From the forty-below nights of a brutal Minnesota winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined.
'Full of surprise, humor, grief, and wisdom.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
'The most vibrant and compelling slice of life I’ve been privy to in a great while.' - Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
'Splendidly unsentimental, quirky, witty, smart and a complete one-off.' - Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Polzin's witty and profound debut, an unnamed narrator reflects on her flock of chickens and her dwindling hopes of becoming a mother. As the unnamed narrator and her economist husband, Percy, work to keep their four chickens alive through a year of extreme Minnesota weather, Percy is in the running for a professorship at a university in California. While Percy awaits job news, a move that would necessitate leaving the chickens behind, the narrator processes the loss of a miscarried child. With their odds for having a child growing slim ("I had hoped to outweigh the risks of pregnancy at my age with sheer desire," the narrator muses), the couple turn their attention to the birds, "an endless source of entertainment and worry." What astounds is Polzin's ability to draw such deep understanding of the couple through their interactions with the chickens, which live only in the moment: "Do the chickens think of warmer times? They do not. By the time a snowflake has landed, snowflakes are all a chicken has ever known. Theirs is a world of only snowflakes or only not." The narrative is full of such sharp, distinctive observations as the narrator works to move on from her desire to have children. Told in short vignettes studded with breath-catching wisdom, this novel feels both delicate and sustaining from beginning to end.
