Battling bad weather, bad luck and predators, the nameless narrator charts a year looking after her four chickens while also coming to terms with her own childless future.

We are introduced to Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness and Miss Hennepin County and learn all about their daily wants and needs, just as the narrator tells us about her life and community, and how she is struggling with her personal tragedy coming to terms with her different future.

It's such a clever idea, beautifully executed. I read it too quickly and will be picking it up again!

What a joy of a novel wrapped up in such a perfectly slim package. Funny but with such emotional heft, I cannot recommend this enough to any reader working through losses of their own - or, any reader more broadly.

In Brood, an unnamed woman narrator tells the story of the chickens she keeps in her yard – their laying habits, their personalities, their small adventures.

Almost incidentally, she reveals details of her own life – her marriage to a clever but distant academic, her successful friend who employs her as a cleaner, her tough, resourceful mother. You sense the tension in her, but only slowly is its cause revealed.

Brood is beautifully written. It’s like a film shot with a tight angle. It takes place mostly in the narrator’s home, mostly in the present, but that very framing gives a powerful sense of what is unseen and unsaid.

I kept thinking Brood would build to a dramatic crescendo. In fact not much happens (for the humans, at least!). Brood maintains the same restrained tone throughout, while at the same time giving a sense of a build to a climax, of a story told, and a satisfying resolution. That’s a hard combination to pull off and it makes for a memorable read.
*
I received a copy of Brood from the publisher via Netgalley.

I loved this book. It's certainly not a plot driven book, but is rich in detail of everyday life. It's like a perfectly formed miniature, whose size belies how much about the character it can convey.

The narrator details her care for her 4 chickens, each of whom has their own personality. There is Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness, Miss Hennepin County. Her care for them is partially a displacement activity as she is grieving for a lost child and the mother she might have been. In between she does cleaning jobs for her friend , Helen and this is one area where she can have a degree of control in life although of course once she finishes she will have to start again.

Her chickens face various threats whether from other wildlife, escaping, extreme weather, the wrong food etc and she tries to foresee the perils they face and make them safe. This seems to be a metaphor for parenthood. The feeding, "mucking out" and general care is observed in minute detail - a microcosm of life.

In the background there is Percy an academic economist. He is quietly supportive but his outlook on life is very different. He seems to bury his grief in his books and papers.

As part of the motherhood theme we meet Helen. Her friend has a small child , Johnson, who the narrator occasionally "babysits". There is also a neighbour's child who loves visiting the chickens. Each of these characters offers a new angle on being a parent.

However there is comedy and warmth in this book as well as pain and grief.

I read many books- about one a week and some shine like jewels and you know you will still remember them years later. Here is a Golden Egg .

.A rare 5 Star from me for an original book
Tracey

Exeter

🌿BOOK REVIEW🌿

Brood by Jackie Polzin

“The chickens’ world has threatened to end in the exact same fashion countless times before, but a chicken does not remember. A chicken lives each moment once and only once.”

This is the story of four chickens (Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness and Miss Hennepin County) and their nameless narrator. Throughout the course of the book we see the narrator work endlessly to keep her small brood of chickens alive and well, despite the world seemingly working against them.

It has been a long time since I have read a unique book and I absolutely loved it! I thought the exploration of the livelihood of her chickens was packed full of emotions and can be seen as a metaphor for human life.

The book also explores the fragility of human life as the narrator is reeling from a recent miscarriage and it seems this has fuelled her desire to keep her brood safe. We also see the spectrum of human relationships and the impact that these have on our everyday life.

This is a beautifully written novel about grief, handled in such a delicate way!

CW// grief, miscarriage, death

🌼🌼🌼/5

Jackie Polzin’s debut novel, Brood, marks the emergence of an exquisite new literary voice. The writing is wryly funny, nakedly honest, beautifully observational and depicts one woman's attempt to keep her four chickens alive while reflecting on a recent loss. The plot could be seen as quite uneventful, yet Polzin’s ability to make the most quotidian of tasks engaging is quite astonishing. Our nameless narrator and her absent-minded economist husband, Percy, reside in the Camden neighbourhood in an exurb of Minnesota. He is currently in the running for a prominent professorship at a university in California but is oblivious to the hell his wife is going through regarding their miscarriage. Over the course of a year, she cycles through grief as she cares for, does on and worries about her four chickens: Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Darkness and Gam Gam, who nest in an old dolls house and certainly grab the neighbours attention being the only brood on the street. The challenges are daunting, to say the least, brutally cold temperatures in Winter, the scorching Summer heat, countless determined predators and an indiscriminate tornado that rips through the area. As she fiercely protects her "girls" from the many dangers and spends hours and hours per day checking up on them, we learn all about the challenges of being a "mother hen", her concerns about having to find them a new home if her husband is given the job and the day-to-day tasks associated with keeping them healthy and happy. She questions her relevance in life and contemplates motherhood; she believes she would've been a good mother and has immense trouble letting go of the possibility. She has, like many other women, an innate desire to carry and tend to a child. She also finds it difficult to bear the thought that others may see her as someone who simply did not want children. When confronting a raccoon in the coop in the middle of the night, she comes alive.

All of her fierce motherly instincts igniting a switch buried deep in the centre of her grief telling her to ensure the broods safety. Her friend, Helen, a real estate broker, tries to keep her occupied by offering her occasional work cleaning and fixing up houses she is listing before they are shown to potential buyers, which earns our protagonist a living, but she still retires to her clucking feathered friends and the extensive time she spends alone allows her to rehash the trauma over and over again. In the end, she is no more able to save her brood than she was the child that she tragically miscarried. This short but powerful, nuanced novel is written with a devastatingly deft hand and although deceptively simple, at its heart it is a richly-described and painfully honest allegory of ever-present and overwhelming grief, which many women will sadly be able to relate to. It's a profoundly moving, sometimes darkly humorous and often heart-wrenching story with wit, quiet wisdom and emotional resonance in abundance. In my opinion, this can only have written by a writer who has experienced this first-hand due to the realism and authentic portrayal of love, loss, solitude and the desperate yearning to care for and love other living beings to try to quell the waves of despair and plug the hole in your heart. While the loss of our narrator’s pregnancy at four months and its haunting aftermath is told in poignant and evocative vignettes, the rest of the narrative is full of acute observations, sublime descriptions and characters who steal your heart. This character-driven tale takes you on an indelible journey from start to denouement with heart and soul, hope and despair, heartbreak and joy. It's a truly intimate and searingly original portrait of a woman who finds solace in nature and in playing a nurturing and almost motherly role in spite of her childlessness. Highly recommended.

I am at a loss - I wanted to like "Brood" - it's funny, honest and has some beautiful observations. Alas, while I enjoyed reading this book, I also kept wondering what was the point. I did not care much for the hens and little insights into lives of hens, their behaviour and struggles - if this was a metaphor, its meaning is lost on me.

Somebody mentioned that "Brood" read like a very dull journal. Sadly, I tend to agree with this comparison. Beautifully written, but boring.

A very different read to anything I’ve read this year. A very isolated book, full of sorrow, wisdom and reflection. One woman’s life and the journey she tells of how she copes and survives.

This is one of those books that seems to be about one thing, in detail, forensic in its description and yet, it isn't about that thing at all, it is about something bigger entirely.
Read one way, this book is about a year spent keeping chickens; how they are fed, kept warm and protected as the seasons change around them. Read another, it is about a woman doing everything she can to keep her head above water with the growing realisation she might not be the mother she had always somehow thought she would be.
There is such a rawness, such truth in the telling in this year in the life, yet the subject matter, the grief, is handled with a light touch. Having been through similar and had a 'happy ending' to my quest to be a mother, some of this felt very close to home and I imagine for someone who is trying to conceive this book could be an painful whilst also being and a soothing.
I liked the writing style too. The images are drawn vividly and seasons and connection (an ignorance of part of) nature are humorously observed. Sometimes a tough, sad read, but a very enjoyable one too.

I adored this deceptively simplistic novel about a nameless narrator trying to keep her chickens alive over the course of one year, against a background of a potential move across the country for her husband's job and her unresolved grief around an earlier miscarriage. It's a powerfully honest book, giving space to the more uncomfortable emotions around watching other people get the things you don't have and what happens when friendship isn't stronger than those feelings. In a series of staccato sentences across short chapters, Polzin manages to convey a whole world of feeling and the narrator is really brought to life despite the sparse prose. It's one of the more unusual backdrops to a novel I've read in a while but I absolutely loved it. Highly recommended and thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I just finished reading this book and I must say, it’s different from all the books I read. So the book is about caretaking and how to take care of oneself and also the words are so full of wisdom and intelligence. It had humor, grief and loss. I loved it. I did not expect to love it. It had everything in there.

Pre-order if you haven’t !!

3.5 rounded down

Ostensibly a novel following a woman and her husband raising their four chickens, Brood is more accurately about what it means (and what it takes) to be a mother whilst facing the challenges that life presents us.

The writing style is somewhat straightforward and spare, which is not to say that there's not skill at work here, just that the words succinctly relay the quiet insights our nameless protagonist gains through her four charges. The theme of motherhood is addressed in the context of her own miscarriage, and the grief she experiences in the wake of this, and I found that the author handled these delicate topics very well. A quiet novel finding beauty and sadness in the mundane events of life.

Every day the nameless narrator looks after her chickens, trying to keep them alive, trying to keep her mind off her troubles. Every moment of focus and love for them is an expression of the grief she can't talk about. I thought this was brilliant and I'd love to know more about the author.

‘A chicken does not speak of the day before. A chicken does not speak of tomorrow. A chicken speaks of this moment. I see this. I feel this. This is all there is. It stands to reason, then, that the sounds of a chicken are few, here and now accounting for so much of what a chicken has to say. The sounds do not misrepresent, are instead like a finger pointing, over and over.’

I have kept chickens many years ago so was immediately attracted to this book and enjoyed it very much, though not entirely for the chicken-related reasons I expected to. The narrator does tell us a great deal about chicken antics and their vulnerability, but the fragility of human life looms large too in the shape of the unborn child she lost to miscarriage. Her attempts to protect her little brood in the hen house are especially poignant as a result, as are her sometimes seemingly off-the-wall thoughts and observations about the chickens, her husband and herself. A process of grief has to be worked through and a new start beckons. Thoroughly absorbing and to be recommended.

I find this a very hard book to review because not very much actually happens but it's beautifully written. My mother would call that 'all style and no substance' but that's not entirely fair. This is about love and loss, about not being where you need to be both geographically and emotionally, and about substituting chickens for more substantial relationships.

I like chickens and I have several friends who keep them. They spend most of their efforts coming up with cheesy names for their girls. One makes exercise videos in which the chickens regularly stroll through the background, pecking away, and utterly indifferent to their figures. Chickens are cool but not overly bright.

In the course of the (rather short) book, the narrator does her best to keep her chickens and her hopes alive through extreme weather conditions. We learn some interesting things about chickens - stones in their stomachs, living in the moment and things like that - but also that they don't seem to live long enough. They certainly don't pay their way in eggs when vet bills are taken into consideration.

I had feared this might be an avian version of 'The Secret Life of Cows' and I suspect some will make the comparison. However, this isn't about large scale farming - it's about one woman, one slightly odd and rather dull husband and four chickens, trying to scratch along together in a not very nice part of a town that's spiralling inexorably into decay. I also learned more than I needed to know about how to clean a house.

It took about an hour and a half to read but when I got to the end I felt that there wasn't much that I'd be likely to remember about this book by the time it hits the shelves. I thank Netgalley and the publishers for letting me have a copy but I'm left feeling a bit empty. I have no idea - sorry - if this is fiction or non-fiction and I'm not sure that it matters.

I was totally sucked in by the cover on this one. I really really love original book jacket design.

The story of a woman lovingly tending to her four chickens, and there’s a lot of detail here about caring for your brood. But her brood is also her husband, and the child they have been unable to have. This is a woman who is desperate to have children of her own and who is finding her own way to a life where that might not be possible.
Original, bittersweet and definitely a lot of chickens, This is one of those quiet understated books that will nevertheless really stick with me.

Brood by Jackie Polzin is a quiet but effective novel centring on a woman struggling with the gradual loss of her brood of chickens at the same time as she deals with her own pregnancy loss.