Sylvia's Farm: The Journal of an Improbable Shepherd FROM THE PUBLISHER
When Sylvia Jorrin first moved to upstate New York, she had no intention of becoming a farmer. Raised to fear animals of all shapes and sizes, she only wanted to create a life for herself and her friends and family in her twenty-five-room shingle-style house. But after a neighboring dairy farmer suggested they use her eighty-five acres of hay fields and woodland to start a farm together, she contacted the South Central New York Resource and Development Center, and they applied for and received a grant of nine free sheep. They soon bought ten more. Then her partner quit. It was the coldest December on record in the Catskill Mountains. Faced with eighteen pregnant ewes and a ram determined to grind her into a wall, and equipped with neither practical nor theoretical knowledge of farming, Sylvia gradually learned to be a farmer, both taming the sheep and conquering the elements. Fifteen years later, this dairy farmer's granddaughter has a flock of 120 sheep, twenty-one goats, two Jersey cows, fifty Buff Orpington chickens, four Toulouse geese, one house cat and three barn cats, one dog, and a donkey, Guiseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire. Sylvia's Farm is the tale of a life on the farm, and all the hard and heartbreaking lessons it teaches. Told in short vignettes that span a decade, it is a journal of growth, persistence, and the unexpected joys that a new day can bring.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
The delight-filled education of an out-of-the-blue shepherdess. Not that there weren't travails for Jorr'n, who chronicled her ups and downs as a newly minted farmer in a weekly column for the Delaware (N.Y.) County Times, from which these short, quiet, yet quick-footed vignettes were drawn. Her decision to raise sheep on her upstate New York spread, which included a rambling house and assorted outbuildings in the foothills of the Catskills, was instigated by a neighbor, who agreed to be her partner but soon bolted-much like the sheep whenever Jorr'n tried to approach them. She stuck it out, slowly learning the ropes, living a hand-to-mouth existence, coming to appreciate both the glory of the place ("June grass, quite uniform and consistent, pale green at first, changing as the summer wore on to an airy delicate shade of rose, exquisite in the evening light") and the all-or-nothingness of the farming life: "Today is a day off for me, of sorts, one of the three I've had this year." In a voice that at times possesses a biblical quality ("They shall teach you what you need to know to take care of them, I was told"), Jorr'n might recite some apropos Chinese poetry ("Come on a whim and gone down the mountain, the whim vanished can anyone know who I was?") or calmly recount the day "the haymow of my barn collapsed. . . . A beam broke and 1,650 bales of hay crashed down on my sheep." She can make warm sentimentality feel good instead of gooey, much in the same surprising fashion she can keep a straight face when she admits to receiving a state grant to learn how to train a donkey. The author never lays anything on for effect; not for a second does the reader doubt that "the most beautiful placein the world to be at night is in the barn."Fine-grained, honest rural sketches, on a par with Noel Perrin and Don Mitchell.
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