Look out Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Chick hatched from his egg with a detective’s hat and magnifying glass, and he’s on the case in this adorable, easy-to-follow mystery from Robert Quackenbush. Within moments of his birth, Sherlock Chick lived up to the name he’d just been given. His parents pointed out the fact that their feed bin was empty and they didn’t know who might have taken their corn. Sherlock follows the trail of corn, questioning animals along the way, until he finds the corn and the culprits. Will Sherlock Chick be able to get that corn back where it belongs?
“One month into our stay, we’d managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn’t have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go.” Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner. But then she became a mother. And when her eldest son was born with a rare, mysterious genetic condition, she and her husband, Peter, decided it was time to slow down and find a supportive community. So the Murphys moved to Purua, New Zealand—a rural area where most residents maintained private farms, complete with chickens, goats, and (this being New Zealand) sheep. The result was a comic disaster, and when one day their son had a medical crisis, it was also a little bit terrifying. Dirty Chick chronicles Antonia’s first year of life as an artisan farmer. Having bought into the myth that farming is a peaceful, fulfilling endeavor that allows one to commune with nature and live the way humans were meant to live, Antonia soon realized that the reality is far dirtier and way more disgusting than she ever imagined. Among the things she learned the hard way: Cows are prone to a number of serious bowel ailments, goat mating involves an astounding amount of urine, and roosters are complete and unredeemable assholes. But for all its traumas, Antonia quickly embraced farm life, getting drunk on homemade wine (it doesn’t cause hangovers!), making cheese (except for the cat hair, it’s a tremendously satisfying hobby), and raising a baby lamb (which was addictively cute until it grew into a sheep). Along the way, she met locals as colorful as the New Zealand countryside, including a seasoned farmer who took a dim view of Antonia’s novice attempts, a Maori man so handy he could survive a zombie apocalypse, and a woman proficient in sculpting alpaca heads made from their own wool.' Part family drama, part cultural study, and part cautionary tale, Dirty Chick will leave you laughing, cringing, and rooting for an unconventional heroine.
A storm is coming to Storm Cliff Stables, and Gaston the goat is scared. Rain! Lightning! Thunder! Gaston fears he'll never get to sleep with all that flashing and booming. Luckily, his farmyard friends know just what to do! Aligned to Common Core standards and correlated to state standards. Calico Kid is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.
Echoing among the Blue Ridge Mountains were the cries of newborn babies that disappeared into the night. The screams of children nearly drowned out by the sound of crickets. A girl, hidden and waiting to be found, terrified, and confused. The fireflies sparkling in the woods, bringing light to darkled places. The bulk of Jesse’s memories were of growing up in the farm country of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. The farm folks stayed pretty much outside of town, except for visits to the feed store causing random tractors to travel down Main Street. There were beatings and abuses, manipulation and terror carried out in spaces breathtaking in their beauty. There were twenty-seven Baptist churches, three non-denominational churches, and one Catholic Church. There were annual Ku Klux Klan rallies on the street where they would walk right by all the black families who came out to watch and the white folks who came out for moral support—whether of the black families or the white, no one knew for sure. Black people did not marry white people in a "civilized society", and so were rarely seen socializing. There was a young woman who was pregnant with a black man’s baby, so her parents disowned her. Jesse’s family was accused of killing the child and burying it on their property. There was the Berkley House Bed and Breakfast toward the end of town, with gold plated silverware and hardwood floors, rumored to be the local sex worker house. There was a mansion up on a hill that overlooked the other humble houses in the town. In the local cemetery, there was “Will B. Jolly” carved into the graves used by bootleggers back in the twenties. Everyone had some form of thick southern drawl, though the length of the “aw” would extend the further south you went. There was a tiny baseball field and a tinier fire department. There was an old lady in the foothills that let the family raid her garden during the summer. And in exchange, Jesse’s family helped her husband bring in the hay for their animals every year. There was a black snake in the attic—the door opened inside the closet next to Jesse’s bed. She would find his shed skins left behind in the summer months measuring close to seven feet in length. There was a creek with crawdads and a moss-covered bridge. There were mulberry and pecan trees that filled her and her siblings’ aching bellies as the weather turned. There were hot summer days and freezing cold winters. There were dogs that were best friends, cats that kept her warm at night, and a cow that committed suicide. There was red clay instead of dirt, hayfields instead of grass, and a favorite swimming hole: Lenny’s Mill, the local grain mill on a glacier-fed creek where you could take a dip if you were brave enough to challenge the frigid waters. Girl Hidden is the story of an unwanted child, born nonetheless and forced into servitude, desperate to protect her siblings and find her way out from under the vicious, manipulative abuses heaped on her by the one person who was supposed to love her unconditionally: her mother.
What would you do if your husband suddenly left you with two kids to support? Go back to school? Go into real estate? Or start a new career as a pimp? Upon discovering that sex work is decriminalised in New Zealand, Antonia Murphy decides to build her own business: an ethical escort agency. It seems like a good idea, but she isn’t sure how it’s done, so she connects with the online sex worker community. MadamAntonia: Hi! I’m new to all this, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about being a sex worker? phryne: Well. There’s sex and there’s sex. What do you plan to offer? These smart, sassy women teach her more than she could have dreamed of – the importance of pineapple juice, how to remove chilli oil from, ahem, sensitive places, and what ‘Greek’ means (hint: there are no togas). Clueless but hopeful, Antonia launches The Bach: a healthy, safe place where women can earn great money and provide compassionate, shame-free pleasure for clients. At least, that’s the idea . . . A poignant and darkly comedic memoir from a mother who opened an ethical escort agency in small town New Zealand – and dared to make a difference. Now a major international TV series starring Rachel Griffiths and Martin Henderson.
The fact that vampire worms were reproducing by the tens of thousands in the belly of my goat should not have come as a surprise. By now I’d learned that country life is not a pastoral painting. Sure, at various times during the year you might see fluffy white lambs prancing in the tall grass, but those moments are rare. Real country life, it turns out, involves blood, shit and worms. Sitting in traffic on your morning commute, with a day of staring at a screen and answering emails ahead of you, you catch yourself wondering: what if I threw it all in for a peaceful life in the country? Antonia Murphy knows the feeling—and she did something about it. Swapping deadlines for feeding times, traffic jams for homemade cheese, Antonia transplanted her husband and children to a small farm in rural New Zealand. But it turns out that collecting your own organic eggs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In her hilarious account of rural life, Antonia exposes the dirty truth behind the agrarian dream: a world of turkey slaughter, maggots and menopausal hens. Not to mention that there’s family life to contend with, too: when her young son collapses on the school bus one day, she realises her troubles are just beginning. It’s mad, bad and dangerous to grow your own vegetables—Dirty Chick will make you grateful that you can get yours from the supermarket, instead.
Here you'll find the American spirit in Phillip Lopate's gridlocked "Manhattan," in Richard Rodriguez's gay San Francisco, and in Gerald Early's uneasily "integrated" St. Louis. In her moving essay on South Dakota, Kathleen Norris reflects on the way objects change our experience of space. Gretel Ehrlich's essay on Wyoming is also about a cure for human grief.
