Fifty Acres and a Poodle : A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm
Jeanne Marie Laskas is 37, with a house, garden, dog, cat, flourishing  writing career--all of the perfect ingredients, in fact, of a happy  city-person's life--when a childhood dream resurfaces. It is a farm dream, this  "song I couldn't get out of my head," and it would make more sense, she ruefully  admits, if she were "at least the farm dreamtype. A person with some  deep personal longing to churn butter." But not Laskas. She likes malls. She  eats Lean Cuisine. She believes "very deeply in the power of air conditioning,  microwave ovens, and very many things you plug in." Nonetheless, she spends  weekends on make-believe "farm shopping" excursions with her boyfriend, Alex,  who is another city person, a shrink and the owner of an honest-to-goodnesspoodle--a farm dream disqualifier, if ever there were one. Then, one  summer afternoon, the perfect place appears, and it's very real: fifty acres, a  pond, an Amish barn, and a magnificent view out over the rolling hills of  Pennsylvania's Washington County. They fall in love. They buy the farm. Goodbye,  city-person life.But the scenery with which they fell in love is not quite like the scenery in  postcards. Things need to be done to it, and all of these things involve buying  and learning how to use different kinds of tractor attachments. And then there  are the neighbors: the sheep farmer who shoots dogs, the curious proliferation  of Joe Crowleys, everywhere the hunters. ("Congratulations on your ... dead  deer," is all Alex can think to say to them.) Over the year that follows, the  two city slickers find out a great deal about livestock, tractor attachments,  and themselves; all of which is related in Laskas's funny, warm, conversational  style. As she leaves behind her ordered, interior world for one that's  gorgeously, chaotically exterior,Fifty Acres and a Poodlebecomes much  more than just a book about learning to live in the country; it is, in fact, a  book about learning tolive--dead groundhogs, emotional messes, and all.  You don't need your own farm dream to fall in love with this witty and winning  memoir, but it wouldn't hurt to look through the real estate pages, just in  case.--Mary Park