With everything happening on Helen Peppe's backwoods Maine farm—ferocious sibling rivalry, rock-bottom poverty, feral male chauvinism, sex in the hayloft—life was out of control, even for the animals. Despite the chaos, in telling her family's story, Peppe manages deadpan humor, an unerring eye for the absurd, and a touching compassion for her utterly overwhelmed parents. While her feisty resilience and candor will inevitably remind readers of Jeannette Walls or Mary Karr, Peppe's wry insight and moments of tenderness with family and animals are entirely her own.
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“A bracingly honest account of a troubled rural childhood inside a large
New England family forced to scratch out a borderline existence on the
poverty line in the last house on a dead-end country road. The book is
brimming full of poignant human narratives that verge on the tragic,
vividly and expertly rendered, but it’s also filled with redemptive
accounts and empathetic love stories about the natural world and the
creature world—dogs, horses, pigs—those wide-eyed companions who
provide comfort along the way to those who are powerless to escape their
circumstances.”
—
Debra Marquet, author of The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere