I suddenly have an urge to buy a farm.
I’m not a farmer, nor have I ever been. For growing up in the Interior in the middle of nowhere, I’m much more city slicker than farm stock.
But I have ancestors who were farmers, some quite successfully. So it’s no wonder that I felt some kinship to Prudence, the protagonist in Susan Juby’s new novel The Woefield Poultry Collective. It’s the first novel aimed at adults from the best-selling author of the Alice series, adapted for CTV.
Juby’s story is a collection of misfits – Prudence, a New Yorker with dreams of farmland and organic crops; Earl, who lives on the farm and outside of the rest of the world; Seth, a teen who hasn’t left his house since embarrassing himself over his drama teacher; and Sara, an 11-year-old half-pint with a maturity, sadly, well beyond her years.
For a variety of reasons, the quartet is attracted to Woefield, a scrub farm in what Nanaimoites would recognize as Cedar. It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys, which is precisely why I liked it.
The characters tell their own story, with point of view changing from chapter to chapter.
We learn how deeply affected Sara is by her parents’ failing marriage when she says how her stomach stops hurting when she’s at the farm. Or how much Earl and Seth like Sara when they agree to help her shear a sheep – which is classic Juby, by the way. Hysterically funny.
While entertaining the reader, Juby also shows that the best families are often the ones you choose and that the odd ducks – or chickens – and a scrub farm can prosper given the proper attention and nutrients.
Footnotes – The Woefield Poultry Collective is available at local bookstores. For information, visit www.susanjuby.com.
