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A review by erica_s
Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Jones
4.0
It's an exceptional book, and I think young readers will enjoy it as much as I did...but they might hesitate, as I did, to give it a 100% LOVE rating. Sophie is an excellent main character to lead a city-reader through an experience on a rural farm. She is unabashedly nervous around ordinary out-in-the-country normality, and yet she spots the criminal chicken-thief immediately. Readers will like her from the start, I believe!
However, when a chicken miraculously & magically lays one glass egg, and then some pages later, a plausible, ordinary explanation is mentioned - that farmers sometimes place a human-made egg on a hen's nest to encourage them to nest - many readers will be unsure whether the chickens are magical or the girl Sophie is overly inventive; she already freaks out at a little rustle in the bushes.
The author easily puts those suspicions aside by revealing an undeniably magical chicken feat, but it comes only in the final 5 pages of the book. Was the author testing the reader to see if he/she would trust her? I feel like readers were set up to disbelieve, to assume an unreliable narrator, so the author could say, "Ha!" at the end. Not only does it create distance between the character & reader, it creates a consciousness that the author created the story AND it could lead many readers to wonder why such magical chickens don't get more front-stage roles. Why don't they get to use their magic?
It also bothered me slightly that the parents are so utterly out of it. They don't try, they don't help, they don't notice anything, they never pay attention, and yet they are completely gratuitously and inconsistently overprotective. While the members of the community are more linked and inter-dependent than Sophie or the reader would have suspected, the members of her family are weirdly disconnected from one another, so that it is hard to remember if the mom or the dad was related to the dead great-uncle, and if her dead abuela and her dead uncle are on the same side of the family or not. An entire family of cousins comes through briefly, does nothing and has no effect and also neither says nor notices anything.
Since Sophie is so extraordinarily attentive, alert, and engaged, it's weird that nobody else in her family has any of her great characteristics. Nobody comments on this weirdness, but when she somehow manages to make "migas" - her abuela's special dish, without a recipe - the phones light up and her mom even comes out of her office and the family enjoys one another's company for once. It made me sad that this brief snapshot of familial joy & love only happened once in almost 2 months of the story.
However, when a chicken miraculously & magically lays one glass egg, and then some pages later, a plausible, ordinary explanation is mentioned - that farmers sometimes place a human-made egg on a hen's nest to encourage them to nest - many readers will be unsure whether the chickens are magical or the girl Sophie is overly inventive; she already freaks out at a little rustle in the bushes.
The author easily puts those suspicions aside by revealing an undeniably magical chicken feat, but it comes only in the final 5 pages of the book. Was the author testing the reader to see if he/she would trust her? I feel like readers were set up to disbelieve, to assume an unreliable narrator, so the author could say, "Ha!" at the end. Not only does it create distance between the character & reader, it creates a consciousness that the author created the story AND it could lead many readers to wonder why such magical chickens don't get more front-stage roles. Why don't they get to use their magic?
It also bothered me slightly that the parents are so utterly out of it. They don't try, they don't help, they don't notice anything, they never pay attention, and yet they are completely gratuitously and inconsistently overprotective. While the members of the community are more linked and inter-dependent than Sophie or the reader would have suspected, the members of her family are weirdly disconnected from one another, so that it is hard to remember if the mom or the dad was related to the dead great-uncle, and if her dead abuela and her dead uncle are on the same side of the family or not. An entire family of cousins comes through briefly, does nothing and has no effect and also neither says nor notices anything.
Since Sophie is so extraordinarily attentive, alert, and engaged, it's weird that nobody else in her family has any of her great characteristics. Nobody comments on this weirdness, but when she somehow manages to make "migas" - her abuela's special dish, without a recipe - the phones light up and her mom even comes out of her office and the family enjoys one another's company for once. It made me sad that this brief snapshot of familial joy & love only happened once in almost 2 months of the story.