Book Reviews
A delightful memoir about love and relocation... [by] an accomplished journalist and also a deft storyteller.... Hilarious....a pleasurable read indeed.
Newsday
Humorous...this true-life tale charts a big-city girl’s transformation to farm gal.
People
Jeanne Marie Laskas is the thinking woman’s Erma Bombeck ... [with] a talent for finding wisdom in daily life.... Even the most entrenched urbanite will be charmed by this book.
Time
One damn fine writer...a charming memoir about buying a farm in the country.
Esquire
In this spunky memoir of a dream come true, Laskas (columnist for the Washington Post Magazine, author of The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know, etc.) recounts her first year of living the country life after buying a farm. Before the move, Laskas lived comfortably with her beloved cat, Bob, and her mutt, Betty, in a small house set on a quarter-acre plot only 15 minutes by bike from downtown Pittsburgh. Her boyfriend, Alex, a devoted urban dweller, was a shrink and owner of a pet poodle who lived separately from her in the city. Her childhood dream of living on a farm unexpectedly became a reality after she found the embodiment of her dream—complete with a barn, a chestnut grove and breathtaking vistas—while looking at farms for sale as an excuse for a Sunday outing with Alex. Their first year together on the farm makes for an amusing and emotional tale, told in loving detail as Laskas recalls her own and Alex's adjustment from single, urban life to a committed relationship in wide-open spaces. She describes clearing the farm, meeting the neighbors, Alex's illness and the death of one of their animals with heartfelt honesty, offering many fresh pleasures for any city dweller who has ever dreamed of buying a farm.
Publishers Weekly
The back-to-the-land movement, as exemplified by the account in Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life, has often appealed to urbanites longing for a simpler, sustainable lifestyle. Magazine writer Laskas, too, had a farm dream, but hers had its roots in a desire to emulate the cuteness of the TV comedy Green Acres. So, at age 37, she purchased a farmhouse on 50 acres located an hour's drive from Pittsburgh and moved in with her commuting boyfriend. Her subtitle "Farm Lessons" is misleading; in reality, she merely moved her office to a rural area. There, she connected a plethora of telecommunications devices, added a few more pets to her household, and hired local handymen to do work around her property. Laskas's attempts at injecting humor into her narrative consistently fall flat. Her slang, repetition, and staccato sentences are as corny as her descriptions of her dogs' antics. She enjoys comparing herself and her boyfriend to various sitcom characters ("We've been behaving like Samantha and Darren") and, in boring detail, rehashes their dull conversations. City dwellers looking for farm lessons would get more inspiration from such memoirs as Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska's Simple Living, about the couple's move to a Virginia farm, and Eugene Logsdon's You Can Go Home Again, about starting a homestead in Ohio. Not recommended. —Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX
Library Journal
A professional, city-living woman up and moves herself and boyfriend to a farm, where everything is way different from what she's used to. Eventually, she and boyfriend find true happiness. It really happened, she says. The End.
Kirkus Reviews