The Chicken Chronicles

I know Alice Walker is an icon and a national treasure and for me this book for the most part was enjoyable. However there are times that I feel an author, especially popular authors, throw some “stuff” together just to see if people will actually buy it.

Mostly semi-entertaining essays about the chickens she keeps on her 40 acre farm north of San Francisco and the spiritual/metaphysical knowledge and joy she receives from them. However there is an oddly out of place paen to Michael Jackson after his death right in the middle of the metaphorical chicken pen - somehow my mind can't reconcile the whole schmeer.

I suppose if anyone could write a memoir about rearing chickens, it would be Alice Walker. Although the book teeters dangerously close to being mushy and smarmy, Walker's beautiful prose just beautifully conveys her love and infatuation with the fluffy fowls. She calls herself the chickens' “mommy”, and her letters to her “girls” is an, er, acquired taste. But I found them funny and endearing, and at times I actually laughed out loud. The only essay that didn't do it for me is the essay where she talked about how her childhood was ruined because she wrung a chicken's head off for dinner (how's that for imagery). ;)