Lady Bird Johnson Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia Sweig

In 2013, The Rachel Carson Award was posthumously awarded to Lady Bird Johnson for her "outstanding contributions to the conservation and environmental movement." If this surprises you, like it does me, it is because Bird's environmental agenda had been tweaked to the more acceptable "beautification" project. 

In Lady Bird Johnson Hiding in Plain Sight, Julia Sweig explains how people like me remember the roadside wildflower plantings and attack on roadside bill boards and not the deeper issues Bird was promoting--issues of environmental justice and racial equality. 

Every biography offers some new slant, some new insight. And Julia Sweig did not disappoint me with a new understanding of Lady Bird, her relationship with LBJ, and their experience during a tumultuous time.

Sweig does not mince words. She calls white supremacy by it's name. We see history, the landmark legislation, the white backlash, the Civil Rights movement, the riots, and the domestic terrorism from a 21st c. perspective.

Sweig presents Bird as a strong, determined, committed, intelligent woman who was necessary to her husband's well being and career. Bird's work of transforming urban environments for physical and mental health, from eliminating pollution to the beautification of  schoolyards, leaves us impressed by Bird's deep knowledge, dedication, and passion. 

Bird was a workaholic like her husband. She campaigned across the country, edited LBJ's speeches and acted as a sounding board. As First Lady she brought together talent and money to develop her dream of healthy neighborhoods, and she mothered two daughters on the verge of adulthood.  

It was interesting to learn about the private contract between Bird and LBJ concerning his running for another term of office, and how their daughters reacted to his decision.

It is thrilling to read a book that does not diminish Lady Bird to an abused, underappreciated, complicit wife. Sweig shows us a true partnership of equals--or perhaps I should better say, the balanced and insightful woman necessary to her man's success.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Lady Bird Johnson on Remember the Ladies
by Nancy A. Bekofske

Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

by Julia Sweig
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date March 16, 2021  
ISBN: 9780812995909
hardcover $32.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A magisterial portrait of Lady Bird Johnson, and a major reevaluation of the profound yet underappreciated impact the First Lady's political instincts had on LBJ’s presidency.

“An inviting, challenging, well-told tale of the thoroughly modern partner and strategist Lady Bird Johnson, whose skill and complexity emerge fully in this rich tale of history and humanity.”—John Dickerson, author of The Hardest Job in the World

 “This riveting portrait gives us an important revision of a long-neglected First Lady.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, vol 1-3

In the spring of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a decision to make. Just months after moving into the White House under the worst of circumstances—following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—he had to decide whether to run to win the presidency in his own right. He turned to his most reliable, trusted political strategist: his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. The strategy memo she produced for him, emblematic of her own political acumen and largely overlooked by biographers, is just one revealing example of how their marriage was truly a decades-long political partnership.

Perhaps the most underestimated First Lady of the twentieth century, Lady Bird Johnson was also one of the most accomplished and often her husband's secret weapon. Managing the White House in years of national upheaval, through the civil rights movement and the escalation of the Vietnam War, Lady Bird projected a sense of calm and, following the glamorous and modern Jackie Kennedy, an old-fashioned image of a First Lady. In truth, she was anything but. As the first First Lady to run the East Wing like a professional office, she took on her own policy initiatives, including the most ambitious national environmental effort since Teddy Roosevelt. Occupying the White House during the beginning of the women's liberation movement, she hosted professional women from all walks of life in the White House, including urban planning and environmental pioneers like Jane Jacobs and Barbara Ward, encouraging women everywhere to pursue their own careers, even if her own style of leadership and official role was to lead by supporting others.

Where no presidential biographer has understood the full impact of Lady Bird Johnson’s work in the White House, Julia Sweig is the first to draw substantially on Lady Bird’s own voice in her White House diaries to place Claudia Alta "Lady Bird” Johnson center stage and to reveal a woman ahead of her time—and an accomplished politician in her own right.

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

One angry woman did everything, and she failed.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

I read Imbolo Mbue's first novel Behold the Dreamers as a galley and for book club. I jumped at the chance to read her second novel, How Beautiful We Were. 

Was money so important that they would sell children to strangers seeking oil?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The novel is about an African village struggling for environmental justice, powerless, caught between an American oil company and a corrupt dictatorship government. 

They are a proud people, connected to the land of their ancestors. They have lived simple, subsistence lives, full of blessings. Until the oil company ruined their water, their land, their air. A generation of children watch their peers dying from poisoned water. Their pleas for help are in vain. 

School-aged Thula is inspired by books, including The Communist Manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and The Wretched of the Earth. "They were her closest friends," spurring her into activist causes when she goes to America to study. In America and becomes an activist. Meanwhile, her peers in her home village lose faith in the process and take up terrorism. 

How could we have been so reckless as to dream?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The fictional village, its inhabitants and history, is so well drawn I could believe it taken from life. The viewpoint shifts among the characters.

We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The fate of the village and its country are an indictment to Western colonialism and capitalism. Slaves, rubber, oil--people came and exploited Africa for gain. The village loses their traditions and ancestral place as their children become educated and take jobs with Western corporations and the government.

This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to sat it, but our story cannot be left untold.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

This is not an easy book for an American to read. It reminds us of the many ways our country has failed and continues to fail short of the ideal we hope it is. And not just abroad--we have failed our to protect our children here in America.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

How Beautiful We Were
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9780593132425
hard cover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher

I was intrigued by the idea of "literary" inventions. 

Angus Fletcher has studied and dissected how the psychological impact of literature, and what literature does to achieve that impact.

It's what first drew me to books. As a girl, I recognized how books widened my knowledge and understanding, but mostly I was impressed by how they could make me FEEL. Books could make me cry. Make me laugh. Cause all kinds of ideas to spark in my head. I was awed by that power.

In Wonderworks, Fletcher takes readers on a historical tour of the great moments in literature, showing the advances in literary tools and how the human brain reacts to cause emotional responses that can heal and enlarge our individual lives.

I have never read anything like it. 

Fletcher's vast knowledge shines as he leads us through his thinking, from one literary achievement to another, showing the development of each "invention". He then parses the reactive brain chemistry that causes the reader's reactions.

I enjoyed reading the book one invention at a time. Some inventions were easy to grasp; others took effort. I was familiar with much of the literature used as examples, but was happy to encounter new ones. Like the ancient papyrus text The Wisdom of Ptahhotep, which advises "For as long as you life, follow your heart." At the chapter's end, Fletcher includes books and movies that offer the same psychic  value as the literature he has discussed.

This is a radical, innovative way of looking at literature. It is provoking. 

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

by Angus Fletcher
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date March 9, 2021 
ISBN: 9781982135973
hardcover $30.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A brilliant examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, that shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling any scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most powerful developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui—all while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found all throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.

An easy-to-understand exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class. Based on author Angus Fletcher’s own research, it is an eye-opening and thought-provoking work that offers us a new understanding of the power of literature.

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander

American healthcare was an absurdist game of Jenga. 

~From The Hospital by Brian Alexander

The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander is the portrait of a Byran, Ohio hospital between 2018 and 2020. Alexander followed management, staff, and patients, investigating the complexities of healthcare in America in one small town. The news headlines we have all seen is presented in a personalized narrative that is deeply affecting; you want to rant, or cry. Likely both.

What America did have was a jumble of ill-fitting building blocks: the doctoring industry, the hospital industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the device industry. ~from The Hospital by Brian Alexander

Alexander follows the Bryan hospital's struggles to keep in the black when other small hospitals were being consolidated or put out of business by larger hospitals. And he shows how medical care has become a profit-making business. 

I was surprised to learn that deductibles were not always a part of health insurance. The rationale was that people would not abuse insurance if they had to pay a portion out of pocket. Affordable insurance comes with a high deductible, and people think twice before using it. Consequently, people go without preventative care and medications and treatment for illnesses. 

It could have been my family when we had to forward paid bills to the health care provider for reimbursement--after we met the deductible. Our baby suffered from continual ear and sinus infections and we often met the deductible by the end of January, which meant a huge decrease in available income for other bills and necessities at the start of every year.

The patients in the book exemplify the danger of skipping care. Those who can't afford medications pay a higher personal and economic cost when disease or illness progresses. Some pay with their lives, some become disabled and permanently lose jobs and income, and many are hopelessly mired in debt. 

Alexander writes that America has struggled with the crisis in medical care costs for a hundred years. Citizens resisted health insurance  a hundred years ago the way they resisted the Affordable Care Act later. Health insurance was, an is, considered unAmerican and socialist by some--even those who benefit from Medicare and other governmental programs.  

"Health...is a commodity which can be purchased," Alexander quotes the president of a utility company, and major employer, in 1929. "The difficulty now is its cost is beyond the reach of a great majority of people." 

Almost a hundred years later, it remains true.

In 1963, my dad sold the business his father had built in Tonawanda, NY, and came to Detroit to look for work in the auto industry. Mom had an autoimmune disease. They needed health insurance. My folks were very lucky. They went from struggling to a nice home, two cars, health insurance to treat mom's crippling rheumatoid arthritis and, later, dad's non-Hodgkins lymphoma, plus my folks paid for my first two years of college.

Today, my son has to purchase his own health insurance. He has to invest his own money in a retirement account. Of course, he has school loans, too. 

We have gone backwards. 

Alexander touched on Michigan hospitals, like William Beaumont Hospital, the Royal Oak, Michigan based hospital where my parents and grandparents were treated. A few years back they tore down an the aging shopping center of my youth and built a new one. It did seem strange to me that a hospital was in real estate. When Covid-19 hit and Michigan went into lockdown, hospitals lost elective surgery patients. Like my husband, who was considering shoulder replacement surgery a year ago. Beaumont laid off thousands and eliminated 450 jobs. During a pandemic. 

The book brought back a lot of memories of our seven years living along the Michigan-Ohio border. I had been to the towns Brian Alexander writes about.  

After fifteen years living in Philadelphia, we moved back to Michigan so our son could grow up knowing his extended family. Neither of us had lived in a small town before. There were under 9,000 people in Hillsdale, and about 40,000 in the entire county. There was a turnover of doctors; our first family doctor, one of the few who delivered babies, left family practice, demoralized after lawsuits. We did have a small hospital at the end of our street. When our son was three, he came down with pneumonia and we were glad the hospital was so close. 

Small town life was an adjustment. We left a racially eclectic city neighborhood for a county with five African Americans; one was my ob/gyn, one his nurse wife, and one his daughter who was in my son's class in grade school. I was surprised by rural poverty. Our son told us that half his kindergarten class did not have a phone and most had no books in their homes. We took took day trips antiquing in small Ohio towns like Pioneer and I took my Bernina sewing machine for cleaning in Bryan, OH. 

I am pleased that the publisher offered me a free egalley in exchange for a fair review. I found this to be an immersive, thought-provoking book.

read an excerpt at https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250237354

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town
by Brian Alexander
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date March 9, 2021 
ISBN: 9781250237354
hardcover $28.99 (USD)

from the publisher

An intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America’s health care crises.

“With his signature gut-punching prose, Alexander breaks our hearts as he opens our eyes to America’s deep-rooted sickness and despair by immersing us in the lives of a small town hospital and the people it serves. “ —Beth Macy, bestselling author of Dopesick

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town’s problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a 39-year-old diabetic literally fights for his limbs, and a 55-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With these and other stories, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans’ struggle for health against a powerful system that’s stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits. Culminating with COVID-19, this book offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we're in.

The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

 

"We deserve our secrets."~from The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

Secrets. Everyone has them. We keep secrets out of shame, out of fear, to protect loved ones, to protect ourselves. 

Keeping a secret can destroy. Guilt that alienates from others and eats at your soul. Suspicion that wracks relationships. 

Some families balance on the edge of a well-hidden secret, and when it is outed, life tumbles like dominoes.

Hala Alyan's family saga The Arsonists' City is a big book, with a big family, following forty years of their lives. I made a family tree to keep track of them! Their journey crosses the ocean, from Beirut and Damascus to America. It is a journey not only across time and space, it delves into the depths of love and grief.

I became obsessed with the novel. Foreshadowing brought me to guess some secrets and conflicts to come. I didn't know if the story was coming to a car wreck or redemption, resolution and growth or despair and endings.

At the heart of the story is Mazna, the beautiful Syrian who aspires to be an actress. When Idris sees her on stage, he is smitten and pursues her, taking her on day trips to his hometown of Beirut. When Mazna meets his dearest friend Zakaria, a poor boy from the Palestinian camps, she is drawn to him.

Forty years later, after his father's death, Idris is determined to sell his ancestral Beirut home, setting off a firestorm in the family. The family gathers one last time, Idris and Mazna, their three children, and a daughter-in-law. 

Idris, not handsome enough, not sure enough, had pursued the beautiful Mazna, a poor Damascan girl with powerful stage presence in the local theater. She dreams of going to London and then American to become the next Ava Gardner or Vivian Leigh. She poses as a friend to his sister Sara. Their marriage was rushed; he caught her "when she was broken." Idris gained a residency in America. They begin in poverty until he established a career as a cardiologist surgeon.

The eldest child, Ava, lives in New York City, married to the American Nate. She comes with their three children, Nate claiming a work trip keeps him from joining her. 

Next is Mimi, living in Texas with his American fiance Harper. Although he runs a successful restaurant, he is frustrated over his tottering music career and aging out of being 'cool'.

And there is Naj, the youngest, who stayed in Beirut. She is a wildly successful violinist, a media sensation, but self-destructive, angry and heartbroken.

Gathering mementos for the patriarchs memorial service, the children discover hints to their parent's secret past. 

The Beirut home takes its place as an important 'character', more than a backdrop to the scenes that play out there. It is a link, a reminder, a legacy. When one of the cherished almond trees is nearly cut down, it is a symbol of the family's frailty. But the other trees still remain, the house still stands.

The family drama is universal in its appeal and message. It is the setting and background that allows American readers like me to see through another lens. "We all come from tribes," Zakaria tells Mazna early on. "People don't need much of a reason to hate each other."

And that tribal hate manifests itself in the act that sends Idris and Mazna spiraling into a future neither expected.

Checkpoints, sectarian violence, the continual war, colors the scenes in Lebanon. 

"The war continued to chug along like a faithful engine, destroying the city. It's like background nose, Sara said once." ~From The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

Once in America, the family discovers they are 'brown', other, victims of mockery and hate. "Neighborhoods are arranged by skin. Jobs, schools." Mazna learns. The beautiful Mazna can not find acting roles, passed by because of her accent, her otherness. She blames Idris for ruining all her chances. 

But it is a small mercy, how time distills what we know, how it fictionalizes it.~ from The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

The characters struggle with their pasts, their relationships, their guilt and their desires. But over the summer in the ancestral home, they find truth and new understanding, family ties are ultimately strengthened. 

I received an ARC from the publisher through Amazon Vine. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Arsonsits' City 
by Hala Alyan
HMH
Publication Date: March 3, 2021 
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780358125099
ISBN-10: 035812509X
Price: $14.99 ebook, $26.99 hardcover

from the publisher

“The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.”—Rumaan Alam

A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home

The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.

The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.

In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

About the author 

HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists' City and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by TheNew Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, LitHub,the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.

 

Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer by Harold Schechter

We had not lived in Lansing, MI very long before people referred to the Bath school bombing. I had never heard of Bath, MI or the school bombing. But the history was legend in Lansing.

In 1927 a farmer blew up the new consolidated Bath school, with 250 children inside. At the same time, his own house and farm buildings blew up. He had murdered his wife and placed her body in one of the farm buildings. He drove to the school to see the carnage and when the Superintendent of Schools came to his car to talk, the farmer set off an explosion in his car, killing them both and killing and harming bystanders.

Forty-four funerals. Nearly the entire Fifth Grade class was dead. Lansing doctors said it was as bad as anything they saw in WWI.

Andrew Kehoe's wife inherited a farm in Bath, MI. They moved in and Kehoe became a good neighbor, involved in the community. When crop values fell he was broke. He focused on the taxes for the newly built school as the cause of his ruin.

Kehoe had an "inventive genius" and exceptional mechanical skills. But a closed head injury may have caused a personality change. He killed his sister's cat. He was seen abusing animals by Bath neighbors and friends. But few suspected he was capable of such evil.

Kehoe collected his explosives. In plain sight, he entered the school where he set up a system of explosives. He remained unemotional and detached even knowing what he was going to do.

Schechter shares the stories of people who heard the explosion and raced to the scene. He narrates the desperate struggle to find the survivors and the awful sight of blasted bodies.

Lansing was fifteen miles away. Victims were taken to the hospitals there, and first responders from Lansing and surrounding communities flocked to help at Bath.

Kehoe had planned his own demise, taking with him the school superintendent.

When Schecter first introduced Charles Lindbergh into the story I was confused. I learned that his historic flight dwarfed the story of the Bath School disaster. It faded into memory as new, lurid murder stories took over the headlines. We do have short attention spans.



Schechter sets the crime in context of the history of mass murderers and serial killers. It was interesting to learn that Kehoe purchased the explosives legally; after WWI, new markets were needed and they were promoted for farm use. A post-war drop in crop profits impacted farmers.

Kehoe's horrific crime of terrorism shocked the rural community of Bath, Michigan, and still appalls today.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Photographs from Newspapers.com

Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer
by Harold Schechter
Little A
March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9781542025324
hardover $24.95 (USD)

from the publisher

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.

Maniac is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage, and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

Brood by Jackie Polzin

 

What an unusual book this is, quietly narrated, full of detail of an ordinary life's decisions. The nameless narrator talks about her four chickens and the daily tasks of keeping them alive. She talks about her husband's pending job offer and the decision to sell their home and relocate closer to his work. In the background is the memory of a lost baby.

In action, the chickens take the most space in her story, their behavior and health, and eventual deaths. 

So, on the surface this is a boring book about dumb birds, those pea-brained creatures descended from the dinosaurs.

Wait! One does have to look under the skim of surface to the deep water below.

Our protagonist nurtures her wards as best she can, but in ignorance learns from her mistakes. 

Like giving the chickens a feed mix that is fifty-percent "Twinkies," junk food, which may have contributed to Gam Gam's death. "I 'd made a practice based on bad information," she thinks. Was there anything that could keep her from making the same mistake again? she wonders. In despair, she admits, "I never feel smaller than when I am filled with doubt, such a small, small feeling, it's a marvel it can fill anything at all."

Oh, boy, which of us has not been there? In blissful optimism, stumbling into behavior and decisions that in hindsight are appalling. I shudder when I consider some of the things I did with my first born. The day I allowed our beloved, exuberantly happy dachshund to run free, then helplessly ran after him as he ran into the street in front of a car.

The grief of losing a baby, the awareness that we can not protect anyone. Our narrator rises in the night, takes a flashlight to the chicken coup. 

"If only I could promise her safety," the narrator says watching her chicken fighting sleep, eyes popping open again and again. But who is safe in this world? Which of us can protect all our loved ones from harm? We can chase away the waiting hawk, but what of the one flying overhead, beyond our view? We can't save our loved ones from nature's furious weather, the unexpected accident, the traumas of life.

Regret is the cost of living, she and her husband Percy agree. One hopes for a decision that does not end in disappointment. But all we have is the journey. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Brood
by Jackie Polzin
Doubleday Books
Pub Date: March 9, 2021  
ISBN: 9780385546751
hardcover $24.00 (USD)

from the publisher

An exquisite new literary voice--wryly funny, nakedly honest, beautifully observational, in the vein of Jenny Offill and Elizabeth Strout--depicts one woman's attempt to keep her four chickens alive while reflecting on a recent loss

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. 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.

Intimate and startlingly original, this slender novel is filled with wisdom, sorrow and joy. As the year unfolds, we come to know the small band of loved ones who comprise the narrator's circumscribed life at this moment. Her mother, a flinty former home-ec teacher who may have to take over the chickens; her best friend, a real estate agent with a burgeoning family of her own; and her husband whose own coping mechanisms for dealing with the miscarriage that haunts his wife are more than a little unfathomable to her.

A stunning and brilliantly insightful meditation on life and longing that will stand beside such modern classics as H is for Hawk and Gilead, Brood rewards its readers with the richness of reflection and unrelenting hope.