User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Imaginative. Ambitious. I love the interplay of genres here, how it starts off as one thing and then becomes another and then another. Pacing was off at times. And sometimes the characters felt indistinct. Still, a good novel.
Rating: really liked it
I was so excited to read this one - a book about rogue Ag workers who liberate hundreds of thousands of chickens from a hen farm. The topic felt unique and juicy. I was so excited to get to know the characters, the decisions that led them to change course, from working for Big Ag to working against it.
Maybe I built it up too much. My expectations were high, and Barn 8 floundered under them. There are a lot of pages of chicken shit - literal chicken shit. So, it feels like at least Unferth did her research.
But the trajectory of the characters - who they are, what makes them tick, what inspires their decisions - that’s all left out and the result is an apathetic experience. The characters. The chickens. The heist. The novel. Who cares? It's all chicken shit.
If you find yourself with some extra time on your hands….this one is still a pass, my friends. Go read We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry instead.
Rating: really liked it
Looking back on Barn 8 as I finished it, I felt almost as if I had read parts of two different books. That’s an exaggeration, because there are clear links through the whole book, but let me explain. As the book opens, we travel with Janey to meet her father for the first time. All through her childhood, her mother has told her she was conceived with the help of a sperm bank, but suddenly she learns that isn’t true and the sperm donor lives in Iowa and provided his donation by the traditional method. She travels to meet him and decides to stay. It’s complicated. In a similar, but less detailed, way, we meet several other characters, notably Cleveland who used to be babysat by Janey’s mother but now works at an egg farm.
Once we have met all these characters and established their backstories to one degree or another, we cut loose from all of that and run with a madcap heist where Janey and Cleveland decided to remove almost 1 million chickens from an egg farm as a sort of statement. The majority of the book is this heist and its consequences.
Throughout the book, more and more towards the end, chronology is abandoned and the story skips backwards and forwards in time so we are often reading things knowing how they will pan out. Unfortunately, for this reader, at least, this does have the effect of removing tension from the story. When the heist does, inevitably, go wrong, you are reading about it knowing exactly where it is heading.
At times, the book is completely bonkers. Who in their right mind would think of stealing almost a million chickens? At times it is political/ethical as it asks questions about the egg farming business in America that have wider implications. It seems clever and worthy: I just wish it had been a bit more exciting to read.
Rating: really liked it
The NY Times Book Review made this book sound controversial and interesting. It wasn't. Not at all. Flat characters, slow, and we knew the motivations of perhaps one of them. I am in complete agreement with Pari's review , who must be a big fan of American Graffiti: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6cac9bde...
Rating: really liked it
My goodness, this crazy novel was so good. Janey, a teenager from Brooklyn, runs away to find the father she has just found out she has. She ends up in Ohio where she falls in with some eco terrorist folks.
They plot the heist of a million chickens, which are from just one agribusiness farm of egg laying chickens. What you learn about how these chickens are treated is almost enough to turn you vegan if your are not already. The author IS vegan. She must have gone through some trauma herself in doing the research.
Of course the heist goes very wrong but you will have to read the book to find out how it all turns out. Deb Olin Unferth is a fearless writer with a seriously whacked sense of humor and a lot of heart. The characters jump off the page and Janey won my admiration as she came to terms with who she is and what life means. Even the chickens became characters.
I am an omnivore and will remain so, but I am looking more deeply into where my supposedly "cage free" eggs actually come from.
I received the book as the March selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, a subscription that continues to introduce me to great books and authors who deserve more attention. I listened to the talk with Deb Olin Unferth on the Otherppl podcast and got more insight into the vegetarian lifestyle and views.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars, rounded up for the brilliant epilogue
Barn 8 is a heist story with a difference - the plot being to liberate an entire industrial unit's worth of hens and comparisons made to The Monkey Wrench Gang made me think it would be right up my street. Initially, however, I was unmoved. At the halfway mark I thought it was OK, it rollicked along well enough but I felt no connection with the characters and I wasn't sure if I would continue. Once we got to the heist itself, I definitely enjoyed it a lot more and felt more invested, however I still felt little connection to the main characters, not really knowing what their motivations were for wanting to pull off this audacious heist. The highlights really, for me, were the incidental characters describing the aftermath - I especially liked Bonnie K, the disaffected park ranger. Oh, and I absolutely LOVED the epilogue which made me forgive the disappointment of the first half altogether!
Not quite the "unforgettably exuberant and potent novel" promised in the blurb, but a fun read nevertheless.
Rating: really liked it
It's rare that any work of fiction, be it novel or film, TV series or serialized romance, can be dubbed "bad," as such a label is almost always subjective. There are times, however, when the word "bad" can be more generally applied. When we're talking about spoiled meat, for example, or the new novel by Deb Olin Unferth, "Barn 8."
Yes, my friends. Rest assured that
this is a bad novel. The kind of novel that threatens to destroy the joy one finds in reading, that makes you turn away from the stack of books on your nightstand, feigning sleep even when not tired.
One day, as children, my sister and I were making eggs. She cracked her egg against the pan and, instead of the familiar yellow yoke, out came blood and fragments of baby chick.
My sister wouldn't eat eggs for years after that.
It was only last year, when visiting her and her husband in Denver, that I realized she'd gone back to eating eggs. We were having brunch at a local restaurant and I noticed she was munching avocado toast with a poached egg on top. "You're eating eggs again?" I asked. "I started eating them again last year," she replied. "Now I love them."
This after going more than
20 years without.
Fortunately, I have a stronger constitution, so reading "Barn 8" hasn't led to a similar revulsion, in this case for all things written.
But it could, which is why I'm writing this as something of a public service announcement, an important disclaimer. Do NOT read this yourself, and most certainly do not give this to your kids to read, as they'll become one of those philistines incapable of sitting down and watching "Parasite" for hatred of subtitles.
To put it more bluntly, if stranded on a desert island with only this book, do not waste time putting it to immediate use in building a fire.
Bizarrely, it all actually started out well enough.
Janey, a 15-year-old girl in New York City, discovers that her mother has been keeping her father's identity a secret from her, so she promptly flies out to Iowa to spend some time with her newly realized father, only to discover that they have absolutely nothing in common — he does live in
Iowa, after all — and she's all geared up to go back home except that then (view spoiler)
[her mother, who Janey's refused to talk to ever since finding out she had a father, gets killed in a car accident, and as she has no other family, Janey is then stuck with dear old dad, both of whom hate this new arrangement and live in a state of shared hostility over the next several years. (hide spoiler)] I actually enjoyed this, it felt different, such unhappy characters, such unhappy events, and all this, mind you, in the first
30 pages! But then things get very strange, and "Barn 8" suddenly morphs from somewhat intriguing family drama into a ridiculously goofy heist-thing that feels like it was written in a collaborative hodgepodge by the children of PETA activists. Think "Ocean's Eleven" with chickens. Except it's more like "Ocean's 422" because the number of characters who are introduced over like three pages (basically one new character per line) is head-scratching in its rationale — and there's no Brad Pitt or George Clooney among them.
Why are we being introduced to characters we're not going to hear of again? Other than Janey, every character here is about as developed as any of the 900 odd-thousand chickens they "rescue" from the barn, except the one that goes "bwaaak" because that one is comparatively developed enough to be played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film version.
I cannot emphasize enough how jarring the shift in tone between these two parts is. If it weren't for the main character's name staying the same, you would think that someone had ripped the first 30 pages off one book, and pasted 220 pages from some other, truly horrible thing, on top of it. It's got a sort of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler thing about it, except that it's as horrible as that Italo Calvino treasure is good.
If anyone says they
liked this book, what they mean is that they liked the message, which is that factory farming and the battery farms they stick hundreds of thousands of chickens into are bad. You won't hear me arguing otherwise.
The problem is that "Barn 8" doesn't just do books a disservice, it does important issues like animal rights and sustainable agriculture a disservice as well. In this case, it isn't the message that should be shot down, it's the messenger.
Rating: really liked it
Halfway through, I thought this would end up a 5-star read, but towards the end some of the momentum was lost, and new characters were introduced that bogged things down. Still, a really interesting read overall.
Rating: really liked it
A young woman with few career options is taken under the wing of and old friend of her deceased mother, who is an inspector at poultry farms, but also an animal rights activist operating with her own moral code. Initially, they save a few chickens from the inhumane large scale farms they oversee, with chickens packed into cages and all the distress we've come to learn about the living conditions of these animals. They form a plan to steal over a million chickens from a poultry farm and to mount such a huge coup, must enrol other animal activists who have been operating illegally to expose the terrible practices poultry farmers use to make ends meet. The heist itself is a fiasco, but the telling of it is engaging and in the end... no spoilers here, but the chickens get poetic justice of sorts. I haven't looked up Unferth's biography, but I assume she is a vegan and wanting to expose the evils of the meat, egg and dairy industries in a way that entertains instead of preaching. I grew up vegetarian but am an omnivore now and minimize animal products in my diet, and didn't feel the usual oppressive judgment that often comes through when vegans make a cause for a meat & dairy-free world. An original take on a subject we all need to stay conscious about to help alleviate & hopefully one day eliminate animal suffering.
Rating: really liked it
The alarming decline of Western Civilization serves as the punchline to Deb Olin Unferth's apocalyptic and big-hearted new novel, BARN 8.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, but there’s still a few optimistic hangers-on that believe we’ll pull through. Take several hundred rag-tag ex-eco activists, a million incarcerated hens being groomed for future work as nuggets and tenders, and one ingenious plan to bust them out and you have the groundwork for this novel that, for all the gloom and doom it forsees, speaks to the unmatched spirit of what people with a common cause can achieve.
With temperatures rising and democracies ripping themselves to shreds, BARN 8 may be the only hope we have left. Unferth fearlessly treads the shaky ground she writes on and delivers her latest masterpiece here.
Rating: really liked it
Oh these creatures, the hens. Three of them live on this scrap of land, and I would put down this book to go outside and stand with them. Try to join their conversations, parse out their songs, scratch in the dirt beside them. The beautiful, curious, strong little beings. "T-rex's pretty little niece," writes Unferth.
Unferth writes about humans who factory-farm hens and humans who try to liberate them. But that all just feels like scaffolding for the real story, which is the birds themselves, as beings with their own perspectives. Every time I picked up this book I found myself weeping. Yes, for the sheer scale and horror of egg farming. But also for the beauty and wonder of these creatures, these animals who are considered the most bland, boring, common in the bestiary.
Deb Olin Unferth is an anagram of The Fun Lone Bird. So we're onto you 'Deb' -- or should I say
'Bwaaukk'?
Rating: really liked it
"Far above the shit, in the shifting sky, the stars were the only objects humans could see and not destroy."
Rating: really liked it
This is a difficult book for me to review. I'm glad I read it, though it felt to me like a very long, slow but steady, march of the chickens. This may not be the fault of the book, as I read it during the week of the homicidal acts of police and resulting protests, all falling on top of the dreaded virus and the world trying to reopen in the midst of that ongoing danger -- so gee whiz, what chance does a book have against all that.
I did learn much more about the regal chicken than I would ever have imagined learning from a novel. Now I kind of love them.
Rating: really liked it
Barn 8 was fun to read - it has an absurd writing, a bonkers storyline, while also simultaneously asking some important ethical questions. I feel like it missed SOMETHING to give it that five star ⚡zhuzh⚡, but it was a good read, with a right balance of emotional depth and humor.
If you liked Anxious People, give this book a try.
Rating: really liked it
I read this super fast and it was fun to read, but it wasn’t really anything special hence the 3 stars.
