Barn 8

By: Deb Olin Unferth

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers

Two auditors for the US egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night - an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland - a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits - assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

Deb Olin Unferth's wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes listeners into the minds of these renegades: a farmer's daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon 40,000 hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses 20,000 years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation.

Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.

©2020 Deb Olin Unferth (P)2020 Recorded Books

Can I eat eggs while I listen?

I downloaded this because of the Buzzfeed Bookclub, and was pleasantly surprised! The narration was great, and the story was compelling. I laughed. I cried twice. I do wish we had more detail in the last part of the book because it felt a bit rushed, but overall I really enjoyed it.

meh

I downloaded this based on NPR's book concierge recommendation which perhaps erroneously categorised it as "funny stuff". If you are the kind of person who reads the word 'chicken' and giggles for a half hour, perhaps under the influence of one too many THC gummies,... maybe so, but for the rest of us I think their categorization did the book a bit of a disservice. There are no unenhanced giggles to be had.

Good writing but a bit dystopian with characters that are hard to like. I did certainly learn a lot about chickens and modern agriculture. Would recommend for ... chicken enthusiasts? maybe a bit of a niche audiance