A woman who remains nameless, though we know her best friend is Helen and her husband is Percy, decides to raise a small brood of chickens in her urban backyard. My son and his wife made the same decision last spring and have many shared experiences with the unpredictability of their beautiful birds, who are descendants of dinosaurs. They are unpredictable, entertaining and they lay eggs. My parents too raised chickens.. This book is a work of fiction but it certainly rings true. I’ve ordered a copy for my kids. They’ll get the part about the kale for sure.

In this book by a Minnesota author, we see the life of our unnamed narrator. A middle aged, married, childless woman who loves her backyard chickens like family and must find them a home before relocating to California. This book is perfect for anyone who loves chickens. It reads like a memoir (I had to keep checking to make sure it was in fact a novel), and is quick an sweet.

This book had such an odd "feel." The author says it is a novel, but it read like non-fiction, almost autobiographical. As anyone who has owned chickens knows, they are not the smartest critters on the block. And this flock was no different. Chicken personalities vary as do people personalities. Brood is the story of a woman struggling to keep her chickens alive and she spends hours observing them and caring for them. As the story progresses we learn she has had a miscarriage and caring for her girls is a way to work through her grief. There is chicken drama on almost every page. Our storyteller is dealing with a husband who is searching for the perfect job, her mother-in-law (or maybe it was her mother) and those eccentricities, a potential upcoming move, the declining neighborhood in which she lives, and always, always, her chicken "girls."

What a powerful debut novel. I am really in awe of the author's ability to make this book riveting from the first page, even as we spend so much of the book focusing on the foibles of and care for chickens. One wouldn't necessarily think that a book about one woman's rather uneventful daily life of caring for her chickens and cleaning houses would be so touching and so compelling. The quiet observations of the narrator and her deep abiding grief struck me so powerfully I found myself laughing and crying. I felt that the narrator's fierce love and protectiveness of her chickens coupled with her feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt, and doubt over her ability to care for them combined to be a truly affecting portrait of motherhood. A really great book, can't wait to see what the author does next.

Moving and heartbreaking; this manages to be both abstract and analytical at the same time. Reminded me of one of Lydia Davis’s collection of essays.

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY: A story about emerging from grief by caring for a feathered flock.

BRIEF REVIEW: Brood, a work of fiction, is a story about chickens, four of them, and a broken woman's determination to see these chickens survive. Told over the course of a year, the Brood: Darkness, Gloria, Gam Gam and Miss Hennepin County, and their caretaker lived in Minnesota with it's sub-zero winters and scorching hot summers. Our unnamed narrator certainly had her work cut out for her. As she tells her story we learn of the challenges she faced along the way, not only in caring for her "brood" but, we also learn of her personal challenges and the deep sorrow and grief of having suffered an earlier miscarriage.

From the perspective of someone like me who has never tried to raise chickens or experienced a miscarriage, I had a somewhat difficult time engaging with this brief novel. While I loved the cover and was curious about work involved in raising chickens, I thought that the writing felt a bit flat. I did learn quite a bit about raising chickens.

Quirky and delightful and searing and snappy! This slim novel was so entrancing. Im so glad I picked it up, I feel like I wouldn't have if the Jenny Offill blurb wasn't on the back. I feel like that was a very fair comparison. This was a witty meditation on grief and a refreshing and honest take on motherhood. I loved it.

A woman becomes obsessed with keeping her four hens alive in Minnesota, in large part as a way of distracting herself from her own grief. Beautiful writing and interesting observations about chickens in a slow, character driven story.

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 proves that even a small-canvas story can contain multitudes, when it's crafted by a writer with a talent for empathy, a scrupulous attention to detail, and a pitch-perfect sense of how to build rhythm in a sentence.

I don't want to paraphrase this story or try to tell you specifically what it's about, because the way it unfolds from its first pages, sentence by sentence, revelation after quiet revelation, is both surprising and quietly masterful. Turning a page sometimes felt as if I was turning a corner to see an entirely new view of things, where even the most seemingly mundane subject could become revelatory. The story is narrated by a character who lives her life with rapt attention. She has exquisite connection with living things, whether they be her chickens, or her flawed friends, From the beginning the novel is delightful. By the end it becomes a meditation on love, grief, and life's meanings.

I'm grateful for the time spent reading these pages.. This novel is the real deal.

Chickens. Because the writing is so good I kept thinking there was going to be some big insight into life. Yeh--no.
Thank you netgalley and the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review

Before I get to the review, I want to make sure to mention I am ALWAYS grateful to receive books from publishers. (A big thank you to Doubleday for allowing me the chance to read this one.) I can try to imagine the herculean task that writing a book must be - authors work many hours, bravely sharing their innermost thoughts and imaginings with people outside and not at all connected to themselves. That's a huge deal, and it should always be recognized as such. I also recognize that every book does not resonate with ever reader. Unfortunately, this novel did not resonate with me.

The synopsis painted this book as an exploration of grief through the POV of a woman dealing with a miscarriage while trying to keep her small brood of chickens alive in a devastatingly cold Minnesota winter. It's billed as being full of "wisdom, sorrow, and joy". I expected big feelings.

My first impression was that the writing was perfunctory, distantly emotionless, and austere. I hoped we'd just gotten off on the wrong foot and kept reading. There were chickens, and they did play a major role in the story. There were a few mentions of a miscarriage.

Other than that, it felt like I was reading clusters of detached thoughts or essays about animal husbandry and house cleaning, with some fleeting glimpses of the protagonist's marriage, friendships, and an almost clinically brief report of her miscarriage.

It all read like a very dry journal.

I tried to unpack it - having dealt with a shattering pregnancy loss myself and being a hopelessly animal-obsessed empath, I allowed myself to be open to the fact that not everyone handles grief in the same way. Some of us wrap ourselves in it, facing it head-on and allowing it to brutalize us until we come out, battered, on the other side. Others of us remove ourselves as far from it as we can, and we stay tucked away from it until we can peek back into our feelings and find a point in time that they won't drown us.

Even trying to think that perhaps the story's protagonist was one of these latter types, who distanced herself from her grief and found solace in these chickens to sustain her through it....I just found myself not connecting with her at all.

Brood certainly has potential, but it missed the mark for me.

A short but deep look into a life that hasn't gone as expected, and the woman who is navigating her changing understanding of herself as defined by the people around her. The chickens have vivid personalities, while the people around the narrator are a bit less solid, which is an interesting contrast.

Brood is the story of a woman struggling to keep her chickens alive in the cold Minnesota weather. The book explores her experiences and thoughts and it quickly becomes clear that there is more than appears on the surface, and that she is dealing with the aftermath of a miscarriage.

I would say Brood is drama in miniature, both in that much of the plot revolves around the life of the chickens and that the central driving force is the emotions and character explored.. Brood was nothing like anything I have every read and was incredibly original, which I loved as it often feels like I'm reading variations of the same book over and over again. At the same time the book felt real, personal, and honest, I believed this character and the struggles she went through. I felt like I knew this person. I certainly have never become so invested in a bunch of chickens.

Well worth a read, especially for people who like well observed character driven novels.

Brood is a insightful and compelling read. The language is arrestingly beautiful, it unfolds in a hypnotising way, similar to the hypnotic meanderings of chickens across a yard. The subject matter of Brood is mostly everyday, the narrator details her struggle to provide appropriately for her small brood of four chickens. In this way, by detailing the mothering required to keep four chickens alive during a Minnesotan winter, Polzin deftly interweaves the narrators miscarriage into this otherwise simple story. Perhaps most impressive of all is how much the reader learns about the narrators grief through her simple interactions with her chickens and the few loved people in her life. Absolutely excellent, I look forward to the next novel from Polzin.

Nowadays most people know nothing about chickens! Not many even know the word Brood! ha! I advise you to read this cute and funny story and learn alot! It made me want to go out to the feed store and get me some fence wire and post to come home and build me a chicken house! Really great book!