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-4762-41c2-8b76-264eba949940 ( )

One of the most original novels I have ever read: about a girl named Janey and a heist of chickens (900,000) from a relatively small-scale egg farm in Iowa. It’s also about dysfunctional families, about not fitting in, about toxic waste dumps and the rest of the economic blights that typify our current dispensation. It is a funny and sad, well written tale of urgent things, told in a slightly off-hand way, never with its hair on fire, even though it could be. I enjoyed it. ( )

Sparkling writing. I stayed with this girl the brilliant concise descriptions, the ability to write equally well about love and comedy. ( )

Using an omniscient narrator with brief chapters, the reader gets to see all aspects of the biggest chicken heist of almost a million chickens, on not even the largest egg farm in Iowa. I feel that the omniscient narrator was the way to go here, but at the same time you can't really delve into any of the characters here very well. The book starts with Janey and I liked the thoughts on the different versions of her, how each choice can so hugely make a life veer off course. Janey becomes an auditor at egg farms because her mom knew someone who does the same work. Then her boss happens to pick up one chicken wandering down the road. It all unravels from there. But then we move to the perspective of undercover animal rights investigators before the heist, then the farmers, security guards, park rangers, etc, then far into the future for a brief moment, which was interesting. I wonder how ridiculous a book fully from the perspective of the chickens would have been?! But this book is not that and I liked it well enough. ( )

I tried to read...because I love raising chickens and the story outline on the back page was intriguing. Didn't get past the first chapter.