Book Review: Life on the Family Farm

Have you ever gone to a friend's family holiday event, sat uncomfortably on the floor, and listened to one of their relatives you'd never met before ramble on about how things used to be?

Me neither, but that's the picture I got in my mind each time I tried to read Life on the Family Farm by Tom Heck.

In all fairness, I'm sure loads of people enjoyed this book. People who, for example, lived on a family farm. It's full of quirky little stories about gophers and pulling rocks out of the fields and mending fences.

I think I really could have enjoyed this book, if it were just written a little differently. 30 pages in, I still had no idea why I should give a hoot about this dude or his farm (with its gophers and fences). I was having trouble keeping his kids names straight - probably because he was throwing them out willy-nilly without any context to make me care or anchor me to the person he was describing. I had no reason to care, no context to anchor to, nothing to really get me into the stories. 30 pages in, and I was done listening to my friend's grandpa tell discordant, rambling tales about the good ol' days when you put in a hard day's work and enjoyed fishing down by the creek in the evening.

For those of you who do enjoy this sort of thing, the chapters are small and easy to get through. You could even take it one quirky story at a time as you have your five or ten minute breaks throughout the day. It might even be relaxing to read a story that finishes off with a description of the big, beautiful, open skies at the end of a long and productive day.

If you're interested in checking out this book for yourself (or learning more about the author and what some people who actually enjoyed this book have to say), you can find all of that and more here.

*disclaimer: I received this book from a friend and was not specifically asked to review it. Amazon is not in any way affiliated with this review.