This book packs a quiet punch- it is a book ostensibly about trying to give dignity and reality to the chickens sold in shops. Our central character writes short, tender biographies about the chickens on her farm, talking about everything that makes them unique.

However, the book quickly develops into something else entirely- a moving portrayal of someone trying to hold onto home and dignity in amongst rapid changes. It is fascinating book that does a lot in a few pages.

The illustrations in this book are beautiful.
The translation is expertly done and seamless.
It has a lot to say about leaving a rural childhood to live in a city, and how you might reconcile these two versions of yourself.

Paule grew up on a chicken farm. Now she lives in the city, and she is a vegetarian. When her mother dies, Paule has to take care of her family home and farm and decides she will continue with the family tradition. But she is innovative in the process and writes a eulogy for each chicken she sells on the market. I love how Paule treats animals with respect and names each individual animal.

Fowl Eulogies is a bit quirky novel. I usually like this in novels, and I expected to love it, but something didn’t quite work for me. Otherwise, I’m still glad I read it. It will definitely stay in my mind, but I wish I liked it more.

Thanks to World Editions for the advanced copy and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

An amazing book. But not for me. In theory this book should be everything I love. But something in the execution didn’t land for me. But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the journey.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into this book at all. It wasn’t for me, but I’m sure that other people might find it more interesting and insightful than I did. The premise was intriguing, but I found the execution to be rather boring. The main character is hard to like or relate to, unfortunately, and the plot was rather whacky.

Fowl Eulogies by Lucie Rico ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book in translation was not quite what I expected, in the best way possible. It was dark, humorous, and sad all at once. The ending was sad but extremely fitting. Thanks to @netgalley for the chance to pre-read this book. Fowl Eulogies came out on May 2nd!

Synopsis: Upon her mother’s death, Paule Rojas, a vegetarian city-dweller, returns to the chicken farm where she grew up. Pressured to fulfil her mother’s last request, Paule rediscovers pleasure and meaning in running the old family business

I didn't expect industrial chicken keeping book to be funny with erratic humor. While there is an underlying tragedy with eulogies and poetic obituaries for a dead bird, it celebrates the life along the way.

I’ve read books about cats, dogs, goats, horses. I’ve read books about wildlife, and zoos. What I have never read about, is chickens. (I’ve also never had any chickens as pets, because one of my good friends is ornithophobic, and swears she won’t visit if we have birds.)

Lucie Rico’s Paule is a terrifyingly mundane heroine. How refreshing to read a character who is not the next best thing in their career, not involved in a steaming love affair, and not traveling wildly around the world. Add to that a complexity that seems so unrealistic that one simply couldn’t make it up, and you’ve got yourself a character at once relatable and impossible to understand.

Contradictory? That’s Paule. Guys, a vegetarian that kills chickens with a billhook - AFTER she’s named them and loved them? Welp, I can’t. (Can someone get the girl some therapy to deal with her mother-issues?)

The astute reader will identify in Fowl Eulogies themes on consumerism, identity, and modern life; but the novel itself need not be a mentally taxing experience - rather it is one of wry humour, absurdism, and a somewhat stomach-churning violence. (Actually, sensitive readers might find the imagery of the chickens’ demise a bit too much. Paule is cruel, and more than a little messed up. I don’t hate her, but I wouldn’t want to know her.)

Nobody but the chickens in Fowl Eulogies is likeable, and yet the novel is thoughtful in both its empathy and sardonicism.

A tip of the hat should go to the translator, who held in her hands the responsibility to keep the essence of the novel, and seems to have done exceedingly well.

This story sounded so interesting that I couldn’t resist requesting it from NetGalley!

Paule’s mother owns a farm on which she raises chickens for slaughter. Paule is a vegetarian who, although she feels a closeness to the chickens, becomes obsessed with killing them once her mother forces her to kill her most beloved chicken Théodore.

After Paule’s mother passes away, the chicken farm becomes Paule’s. As Paule writes eulogies for the chickens she raises, kills, and tries to sell at the market, she attracts the attention of an entrepreneur, and their relationship will forever change her life and the lives of her chickens. Fowl Eulogies is at times humorous, devastating, infuriating, touching, heartbreaking, and disturbing. For Rico to be able to evoke those feelings in her readers is impressive!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what I enjoyed the most were the eulogies. But I think that Paule’s relationship with the chickens and her character arc were also what I loved about this publication. It’s easy to feel frustrated with Paule’s decisions because, as an outsider, we can see how manipulative and terrible some of the people in her life are. But her wholesomeness and her ability to look past others’ flaws is admirable: she believes in others—even if they’re flawed, especially because they’re flawed.

Even though this is a shorter work of fiction, Rico does a great job of presenting readers with a complete story of loss, rediscovery, connections across species, consumerism, capitalism, migrations to cities, animal rights, and how to prevent senseless death.

If you enjoy reading about relationships between people and other animals, the repercussions of consumerism on animal rights, humorous eulogies about chickens, or how one woman attempts to build a life for herself after her dominating mother passes away, then this book is for you!

Also, this translation is fantastic, so Daria Chernysheva deserves to be praised as well! I can see how a poorly translated version of this book could have been a disaster. Instead, Chernysheva did Rico’s story justice and, more importantly, some heart and soul!

I highly recommend this shorter work of fiction and hope many others pick it up and enjoy its quirkiness! Many thanks to World Editions and NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC of Fowl Eulogies in exchange for an honest review!

I'm awestruck by this book. I'm messed up in many different ways with the story and the characters, with its plot and its writing. This book is disturbing, weird, bizarre, and completely unhinged. This is not just a simple story of a woman grieving. It is more than that.

I think Paule's characterization is brilliant and thought-provoking.
She is a representation of the society's attempt to conive consumerism and sustainability that is far too imposible to completely achieve.
Looking back in her journey, I find myself asking, "Why?" What's her motivation? If she's not grieving, would she do the thing she did? "

I still have a lot of unanswered questions, some are just coming to me as I write this review( and I love it that way). Most of the praises I'veread for this book says it is funny but I didn't find anything funny in this book. Maybe some things got lost in translation:(

I'm only giving it four stars for 2 reasons:
1. it made me feel uncomfortable.(in retrospect, this might have been the end goal of the author in writing this book), Majority of the book displays graphic animal violence(specifically towards chickens)
2. plot wise, i think it was lacking, i want to completely understsand the type of relationship Paule has with her mother and also with Luis but in my opinion, it was not presented clearly in the book.

The last line of the book left me speechless.

What a weird little book—It’s as silly as it sounds, but it’s also not at all. I look forward to finding the words to describe it. I loved it.

The chicken eulogies brought comedic relief amongst so much loss, I really enjoyed the author’s writing!

This is equal parts a bizarre love story and twisted horror story and I can’t decide which part I liked more. As someone who has chickens as pets (and for the eggs) this was a wild ride for me.
Paule has come back home from living her life in the city with her boyfriend Louis to tend to her mothers last wishes after her death. Paule has to handle the farm’s needs and the chickens that live there. Once Paule is there and amongst them and has to deal with the butchering, she finds herself noticing their various personalities and quirks and sets out to write biographies for each of the birds she is killing. She does manage to attach to a couple of them that she can’t let herself murder, but for the most part, she gets to know them, then writes about them and then kills and sells them at the local market. Then her uncle comes and introduces her to someone who sees the potential in what she is doing. It’s a niche idea, but one he thinks could take off. As the business grows, Paula’s disdain grows with it. And darkness grows all around her.
This is super imaginative and absurd and I am into it. There’s dark humor, cringe-worthy descriptions of the birds mixed with some heart wrenching insight into farming and consumerism. This dystopian tale is one I won’t forget anytime soon.
Thanks to World Editions and NetGalley for this eArc in exchange for my review.

“Innovative poultry-farming business seeks copywriters to write the lives of the chickens. Writing and marketing skills required.”
This quirky, weird, story of grief and love is funny and sad at the same time. I am disturbed and will be chewing on this one for a while.

A poignant tale of loss and coping, and also of becoming. Parts of this tale brought me back to farm life as a teenager and later as an adult. The wacky and offbeat eulogies for the chickens provide sparks of humor in the darkness where the story develops and it then bursts with brilliance! Dark and humorous, and, some will say, slightly macabre, this book will live on in the English translation!

As someone who has spent a good deal of time with domesticated birds (in my case, racing pigeons) I loved the way Lucie Rico gave space for her protagonist Paule to delight in her chickens, to recognize each of them as individuals with their own personalities and quirks and delights, and to honor them for their unique contributions before she slaughters them for market. It's a confounding miracle to me that birds, and I imagine all living things to some extent, really do have their own individual ways of being in this world. Ok, I'm not sure about sheep. I hear they are a little one-note. But birds, yes. There is so much to enjoy in this novel for this reason alone, that it dares to suggest how creatures with bird-brains somehow have an individuated glorious uniqueness to be celebrated. I can imagine a god that has told birds each feather on their heads is counted. Rico takes this premise to the furthest possible, ridiculously dumbfounding extreme, and I was here for it.

This is one of those weird-ish books that you'd recommend to people who loved Motherthing, or Big Swiss, or Hurricane Girl. Just a little off the wall but in a charming way.

Soundtrack: Orion Rigel Dommisse - Chickens

I have been reading the novel from the point of view of the ahuman, as Patricia MacCormack would put it, which as a conceptual practice aims to liberate the animal from the human in absolute terms. Seen from that point of view, whether chickens are individualized (through naming, biography, eulogy) and supposedly properly "grown", or killed on an industrialized scale where individuality is a simulacrum as later in the novel, matters little. Both approaches are equally detrimental to the animal life, and only serve humans. The biting humor and oftentimes rather uncomfortable turns of phrase underline cul-de-sac of vegetarian/carnivorous dichotomy when faced with the real of animal exploitation. The dichotomy's all too human.

A quick and interesting read about a woman who chooses to cope with the morality of killing chickens by writing them personalised eulogies.  Absurd yet insightful, this chicken dystopia questions the ethics of industrialised farming and mass consumption.  Perfect for fans of Sayaka Murata and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Vegetarian Paule inherits her mother’s chicken farm and processes her grief by writing cutesy biographies for the chickens she kills, eventually opening up a ‘humane’ city chicken farm as her popularity grows. This book and I did not see eye to eye, sadly! I think it’s meant to by an ironic send up of idealism vs the food industry, but I just found it quite distasteful — perhaps our senses of humour just didn’t match up!