Review: A Strange Book - Interesting But Not Very Helpful
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 15, 2013
This is a very odd book.Almost the entire first half of this book is about the author's personal life story.  Parts of this were interesting, but it got pretty tedious too - I didn't buy a *biography*, I bought a book on homesteading.  I really didn't need her full psychological history and her detailed personal background.  I didn't need to know about her mistakes in high school, her meandering travels, her mental health struggles, and her family background.  It felt very self indulgent and it really got on my nerves after a while. [A couple of personal introductory pages would have been great, but not half the book...!]  I put the book down in frustration many times thinking I'd just quit reading it, and then picked it back up because I thought surely there would be some useful info if I could just stick with it long enough.Then somewhere near the middle, there is a long rant-y discussion of economics and how our society works.  I found it sort of interesting, but again - kind of weird and out of place, based on the title of the book and what I was expecting when I got it.If you make it to the half way point of this book, you will begin to find some information on homesteading.  As other reviewers have noted, she doesn't go in depth on any subject.  This is a broad introduction of sorts. Much of the information she includes is very specific to her climate and her personal situation.She also has some very strong opinions about homesteading and much of her advice conflicts with what you may find in other sources.  I thought some of her ideas were interesting, but I got a little frustrated with the "my way is the right/only way to do this successfully" kind of attitude.For one thing, she is very negative about any sort of animals being kept on a 1 acre homestead, beyond four chickens.  She doesn't seem to feel that you can or should raise any other types of animals. She very briefly mentions goats, with a caution that you shouldn't get them.  She does not mention rabbits at all - which I thought was odd, as they seem especially well suited to a small homestead situation.  No mention of bees either.In the book description, she says "In this book, I answer the question 'is self-sufficiency really possible on one acre of land?'".  I don't think she really achieved this.  She tells us how she's personally TRYING to become self sufficient in her own specific situation, but I don't think she gives information that could really help a person determine this for their own situation.She does talk a lot about planning the homestead, but her advice was unclear to me and seemed really specific just to her own personal plot of land.  After wading through this entire long ebook, I really have no idea at all how to apply the things she mentions briefly to my own situation and my own land.I don't feel like I know any more about how to make my self sufficiency dreams a reality now than I did before I read this book.  It was interesting in parts, but pretty much a waste of time for my purposes.Overall, I would not recommend this book.