Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

When Flora Poste is 20, her parents die within a few weeks of each other of the flu. Flora’s father had always been considered a wealthy man, but after he died, it was discovered that there was no property and very little money for Flora to inherit.  She would have 100 pounds a year, which, of course, was insufficient for a young woman to live on.

Being unequipped by her ‘expensive, athletic and prolonged’ education for earning a living, Flora writes to all her relatives asking them to ‘take her in’. She receives an affirmative reply from her cousin Judith at Cold Comfort Farm, and goes off to the Sussex countryside to join the household.

She finds a farm in decay, full of miserable family members. In her no-nonsense way, she takes the farm and its inhabitants on as a project and proceeds to make their lives into what she perceives they need to be.

This book is a parody of the romanticized, often doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time this novel was published in 1932.

260 pages

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker

A scholar of Emily Dickinson rents a farm in Wales. She calls herself Emilie. She eats, she sleeps, she walks around the countryside, and she goes to villages for food and other supplies. She begins to make paths and plant shrubs and flowers. She sees that there are 10 white geese in the field, and they begin to disappear, one by one.

Gradually, we learn that she is ill, and that she fled Amsterdam because she had an affair with her student. She told no one that she was leaving.

This is a book club selection for me, and I found it really, really boring. There is no character development; the characters for the most part aren’t even named. They are: the husband, the wife, the mother, the father, the policeman, etc.  There is no real plot; we get glimpses of her life before Wales, but never the story. I like stories! And I like to know about characters: who they are,  how they think, what makes them who they are. There is no story here, and the characters are cardboard cutouts.

Not a book I will be recommending.

241 pages