Our April Front Porch Book Club Pick is Jackie Polzin's 'Brood'
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Pull up a seat as we dive in to one book each month with the Country Living Front Porch Book Club, capping each month with a chat with the authors themselves. Our April 2021 selection is author Jackie Polzin's Brood!
In Brood, our April Front Porch Book Club selection, author Jackie Polzin’s unnamed narrator grieves the loss of an identity she worries she’ll never get to experience: She yearns to be a mother. A miscarriage has robbed her of this possibility, and the narrator’s world grows small and contained by her grief (an apt feeling as we contemplate emerging back into the world post-pandemic). But then she adopts a brood of chickens.
On the surface, this is what Brood is about. What kind of food should she feed them (the “Twinkie” diet might not be best)? Should they have more space than just her garden? Are they safe? Are they too loud? What about the foxes? The raccoons? But that’s just the surface.
What Brood is really about is tucked in its delicate language. In pockets of the everyday—dropping a pie off at her mom’s house, cleaning a bathroom, putting her house on the market—the narrator navigates the reality of life after Something Major has happened. In this way, Brood is actually about the small moments of everyday life that shape our emotional journeys and the many ways we mother the animals and people we love. “All would be well because I wanted it completely,” she tells us. But of course, we readers know this isn’t how life works. Yet haven’t we all wanted in this way at some point in our lives?
To take care of the chickens, the narrator realizes, she must succumb to the realization that she cannot hold them, cocooned and safe, in her arms their whole lives. She must let them go, free to wander and roam, to squabble and sing, to live.
Brood’s magic isn’t loud—it reads like diary entries or meditations—but the story unfolds in that quiet mastery, circling the tension that exists in the day to day when you aren’t sure what your days should look like anymore. Within all that life—the trials and tribulations of the chickens’ first winter, the endless waiting for a job offer the narrator’s husband may or may not receive, the comings and goings of the neighborhood—is the gently unfolding journey of solace, of metaphor in caring for her flocked brood, and healing. “Before having chickens I never noted the arrival of birds in the springtime, but now, because the readiness of worms concerns me, I watch the sky for the first dash of orange.”
Grab a copy of the book and read along with us this April, then find us on Instagram on April 29 at 12 noon EST as we chat live with Jackie about the novel and answer all your burning questions!
COUNTRY LIVING FRONT PORCH BOOK CLUB SELECTION FOR APRIL 2021
Selection: Brood by Jackie Polzin (available via local bookstores, Amazon, or Bookshop)
Start reading with us now.
Tune in to Country Living's Instagram as Jackie answers your questions and chats live with us about Brood on April 29 at 12 noon EST.
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