The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses, & Babe

by Alice Walker

A “life-affirmative and eccentrically inspirational” collection from the National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple (Kirkus Reviews).   In these glorious, offbeat, and compassionate tales, one of America’s preeminent authors shares her experiences raising and caring for a flock of affectionately named chickens. Walker addresses her “girls” directly, sometimes from the intimate proximity of her yard, other times at a great distance, during her travels to Bali and Dharamsala as an activist for peace and justice. On the way, she invites readers along on a surprising journey of spiritual discovery.   Both heartbreaking and uplifting, The Chicken Chronicles lets us see a new and deeply personal side of one of the most captivating writers of our time. In turn, Walker has created a powerful touchstone for anyone seeking a deeper connection with the natural world.   “Heartfelt, thought-provoking ruminations on sustenance from perspectives of both giver and receiver.” —Library Journal   “Walker’s sage, compassionate memoir is meant to be savored and contemplated.” —Kirkus Reviews

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Animals, Biography, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Poetry

216 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Noted American writer Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her stance against racism and sexism in such novels as The Color Purple (1982).

People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book consists of Alice Walker's mullings over her relationship with her chickens. It's very anthropomorphic and sentimental. I don't usually mind that, but with Walker it was excessive. Lots of references to herself as Mommy and her partner as Dadee, (as mom and dad to the chickens.) Lots of philosophising about the problems of eating meat, and how we should treat animals, but this was more poetic than logical, and I found it abrasive. She also touches upon the behaviour of chickens in relation to bullying, ie 'the pecking order'. The following extract I think illustrates both an extremely unpleasant aspect of chicken behaviour, and Walker's overly-humanizing attitude to her birds.

From what I'd been reading in my chicken manual, I thought we should bring in the whole gang of new chickens and, in their numbers, they could duke it out with the chickens already established in the chicken house. Ultimately, this is what we did. ...

Oh, the way you treated them! I was heart-sickened. I was appalled. I had only know you as gentle and cuddly, blissed out on Chardonnay grapes and kale leaves. You were vicious to your new mates. You pecked and scratched them: you wouldn't let them near the food and water. You didn't want Mommy to be Mommy to anyone other than you. When I tried to share goodies with the Red Gang of Six you wouldn't allow it, unless I forced you out of the way. I was so embarrassed for you. Were these the "children" I thought I was raising? But guess what? From your point of view, you were acting as chickens, you were doing what comes naturally to chickens: you were creating the pecking order that chickens live by.

My impatience with your behaviour led to a withdrawal from you. I felt disappointed and deeply saddened. This made me stay away for days (at least two). When I went back to visit, you were still at it. Mean as could be. Abusive and ugly. Yes, ugly. Mommy found this brutalizing behaviour so hideous she could hardly look at you. And when you jumped into her lap, wanting a cuddle, sometimes she stood up. It was this event, when she felt she simply could not bear you in your meanness, that was probably the most serious threat to Mommy's health and heart.

This book discusses issues that interest me, but in such a cloying and sugary fashion that in the end I felt repelled.

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that some of my Goodreads compatriots need to chill a little bit. Yes, this is Alice Walker, and yes, she has written some pretty heavy and significant works in the past. But this is different. She says it straight out from the beginning that this is a collection of short musings that were mostly blog posts. Some are lovely and some are random, many are written in the form of letters to her chickens written from Alice's far-flung personal travels in pursuit of better rights for women around the world. Alice writes about unexpected love and devotion from members of her flock, the beauty that is available if you just sit down and watch, our helplessness in the face of sudden loss, and the survival of families (including her own). I liked her thoughts on vegetarianism vs. conscious/conscientious eating and the other small insights unto the private life of a writer I respect immensely. She may have been mostly talking about her chickens, but there was much more to it. Good book. I'm sold. I am buying our peeps as soon as we get back to the mainland.

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just incredible. Read this:

What she did not expect was that the Ameraucanas among you, you of the pale green and blue eggs, would also sprout beards. Beards in the Abe Lincoln style; beards that go up to and seemingly into your ears. What magic is this? Bearded ladies who also lay colorful eggs! The wonder of this leaves Mommy breathless.

and this:
Sometimes, sitting on my green stool and lulled by your complete indifference to the consequences of your natural behaviors, I wish we were more like you. More relaxed with our breasts and bellies and our feathers (of whatever sort) and our heights and weights and how we toss our heads back to drink water or how we sometimes let a leaf of lettuce slip from our fork.
You seem so clear about who you are. So certain that you are just right as you are, that for all your intelligence and maybe in spite of it, you never seem to need a second opinion.

The top five best things about this book:

1. Alice Walker is an incredible writer and observer. This book extends those talents to the humble subject of chickens, wherein the author elevates the subject by extolling the beauty, friendliness, personalities and life forces of such majestic creatures.
2. There is a chapter where Alice Walker talks about smoking pot. (!!!)
3. The chickens have great names. Just say out loud "I'm reading this book about chickens named Agnes of God and Gertrude Stein," and try not to smile.
4. Alice Walker totally captures the strong feelings I feel toward my flock - and she is as surprised by her feelings as I was to discover my own. It is surprising to learn how lovable and wonderful a small backyard flock can be! The profound joy and peace of watching chickens forage while you share your yard with them, and the intense, shocking grief of suddenly losing a bird - oh, Alice Walker has got all this covered.
5. Alice Walker has interesting travels and religious experiences, which she manages to relate to her backyard flock in interesting ways. Searching for chickens on a visit to India and trying to explain Ghandi to her chickens may seem silly, but that stuff made the book richer than just a "memoir of a backyard flock by someone awesome and famous."

The top two bad things about this book:
(I could only come up with two things!)
1. Most of the book is written as a letter to the chickens. That's cute, except the author refers to herself in third person by the name "Mommy" for most of the book. It grated on me a lot by the end but did not surpass the awesomeness of this book.
2. Alice Walker details every time she eats meat while she is a chicken keeper, and apologizes to her flock for these transgressions. I'm closing in on two decades of vegetarianism, but the apologetic, guilty lapsed vegetarian shtick grates on me.

In conclusion, you should read this book.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Walker - I've loved and admired her work, and enjoyed most all of it for decades now. I have some friends who keep chickens, and the little flocks seem to grow in their hearts, so I figured Alice Walker, plus chickens - that should be fun for a weekends reading.

And it was fun - Walkers take on chickendom is wonderfully present. In fact, but for one annoying thing, I would have given this book 4 stars. And what, you may ask, was so annoying? Well, I'll tell you - Walker's little essays on chicken life started out as blog posts, and in them she constantly refers to herself as Mommy - as if she were mother to a toddler experiencing her first separation from the omnipresent Mommy - as if! About the third "Girls! Mommy is blah blah blah . . . " and I was done with that tired, tried and not very true device - yet on she went, page after page, essay after essay, entry after entry, until I wanted to go to my local fried chicken place and order a double bucket just for spite. (yes, it really was that annoying)

[cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

2011 Book 84/2011

Really a 2.75, but since it *is* Alice Walker, I rounded up. Alice Walker spending 200 or so small pages detailing the daily lives of her chickens? Yep, that is the whole premise of the book. And she mostly pulls it off, finding ways to use the chickens and her relationship with them to speak of ancestors, memories, meditations,loss, and the need for a world-shift towards peace and understanding for all creatures. HOWEVER, the books starts off as what were clearly blog posts and then devolves into letters *to* the chickens in which she begins calling herself "Mommy" to them. After 18 chapters of that twee artifice, it became difficult to be as fully present as Alice or I would like for this meditation on chickens. Still, Alice Walker! I adore Alice Walker and so I read a book about chickens and put up with her strange Mommy language (and as an aside, knowing her history of strife with her daughter, it was interesting to see her so fully embrace the term Mommy for her relationship with the chickens, and at times, even with the neighbors who bring them into her life, when her one biological Mommy relationship has been so publicly difficult).

[Marieke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is hard to rate and review. In some ways it's a two star read for me. Other reviewers have remarked on how it's a bit strange and I agree with them. It started off well enough, but the farther along I got, the more annoyed I felt at the use of the third-person and Walker referring to herself as "mommy."

The book came from a blog she kept (keeps?) and I wish she had taken the time to develop this book into something more polished and substantial and that would have hanged together better. This was not quite a memoir and not quite like reading a blog, since it wasn't presented as a blog (and I don't know which blog posts were left out or if the order of her posts/letters to her girls/essays were changed in publishing this book).

I decided impulsively the other day to take it off my shelf and read it because of an article i read about the numbers of pet chickens being abandoned at shelters. I shared the article on facebook and had an interesting conversation with friends about the chicken-keeping craze sweeping our nation. I wanted a bit more chicken in this book, so that was a little disappointing, too. The chickens were more in the background and served primarily as launch points for Walker to probe her memories and reflect on events and experiences in her life. I didn't mind that, but really I wanted MORE CHICKEN! And also more research about the chickens and chicken-ness, but alas, Alice Walker is a poet and activist, not a journalist or stunt book author, so she is forgiven. Despite wanting more, I did get a sense of her birds' personalities and behaviors.

Thankfully this book was short and read quickly. And thankfully her writing is a pleasure to read for the most part. Otherwise I would not have been able to finish this. Not to mention that it was a bit too much "California" for me if you get my drift. Sorry, California friends...your state truly harbors some real loopiness. ;)

[Michael Burge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is less a book and more a heartfelt bridge Walker offered to her estranged daughter. Like many great thinkers, and many great feminists, Walker lost touch with her heart for part of the way, and she found it again through entering into the symbiotic relationship humans share with chickens.

Endure the writer's use of the phrase "Mommy" (which triggered my thinking that this memoir is actually a long-form love letter to her actual daughter), and dive into Walker's animal world, where she offers a treatise on all life forms being one. Human does not rein supreme here.

After total estrangement, it seems that Walker and her daughter have at least seen one another since the publication of this memoir. I can only think that what Walker learned from being a mother to a clutch of chooks opened a place in her heart that her daughter asked for as a child.

A fascinating read for anyone who has ever tried to use emotion to cut through the steely walls of an academic, or a distant parent, and wondered if there is any heart process going on underneath the surface.

[Nicky Dierx · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never read anything by Alice Walker before picking up this book.
My partner is a big fan and has all of her works on a shelf which I'm sure I will someday read, however her name isn't why I picked it up. It was the fact that my wife just about died laughing the whole time she was reading it. I figured anything that made her that amused had to be at least halfway decent. And I'm glad I gave it a shot.
It was hilarious, poignant, and downright insane at times. I hope this lady's out there in the world making it a more eccentric place. We need more of that.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Walker loves her chickens and I loved this book. Not everyone will love it. Nothing happens other than Alice Walker loving her chickens. She sits with them daily or writes to them from abroad and she ponders life. That's it. She refers to herself as mommy and in the third person which was a little clunky but I found it to be a meaningful and meditative read full of the joys of nature and life. Just what I needed during a cold and dark January.

[K2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

GoodRead. If you go into this read knowing that it’s like a long poetic metaphoric type of read you probably can absorb the life lessons that Walker gives. They are most definitely there plus some tidbits facts about how some saying came to be. It gets a little tedious with the mommy & the chicken shit🤣 but again if you can see pass that and grasp the lesson you just might enjoy.

[Kristen]

Added this after hearing her interview on NPR: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/201...

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternately transcendent and maddening is how I’d describe Alice Walker’s written dedication to her pet hens, The Chicken Chronicles.

The wonderful thing about Chronicles is how lovingly the author describes the birds and their individual lives. No doubt, many readers drawn by the “star power” of the author’s name alone will learn that chickens do indeed have individual personalities, rich lives, friendships, intelligence, and behavior comparable to that of family pets. Having previously only known chickens as intended meals, Walker herself often seems surprised by their depth:

Babe settled into my arms…like she’d always been there, drowsy and quiet, as if she were a cat. Who knew?

When a chicken dies in an accident, Walker mourns her. So too, do the other hens. Gertrude clearly misses her special friend, Bobbie; the two birds had been close companions in the chicken yard.

From the beginning, Walker makes clear that this is no Kingsolver-esque “foodie” journey: her chickens will not be eaten. True, Walker does collect the eggs they periodically lay, but let’s face it, if unfertilized, chicken eggs are just a waste product anyway. Early in the book, Walker describes herself as a

Mostly vegetarian person who still eats chicken soup when I’m sick and roast chicken when I can’t resist. But I could not have eaten Babe.

(I found myself hoping that by the end of her journey, the friendship of the hens would convince Walker to give up bird meat entirely.) Like many of us “pet people,” Walker begins to see her relationship with her animal companions as something of a parent-child connection; midway through the book, she begins referring to herself in third person as “Mommy.” I won’t begrudge her for this bit of whimsy, if I were to write a book about my three cats, I would no doubt do the same. (We companion animal devotees are a bit, well, different.) And like many of our pampered cats and dogs, Walker’s chickens lead lives of ease and luxury, so radically different than their pathetic and abused factory-farm brethren:

It delighted me that her experience of being a chicken on earth among humans was a loving one. That she ate only the best food, slept in a clean chicken house, had a nest ready for she and her eggs, should she ever happen to lay any. If someone had tried to tell Babe about the cruelty done to chickens by humans, and she could understand the language, she would not have believed them.

How does Walker circumnavigate the elephant in the room, the fact that billions of chickens no less precious are intensively farmed and slaughtered, and the manner in which most modern Americans relate to chickens is only as an ingredient?

In Alice Walker, we see the vegetarian in her struggling mightily to show her face. She admits of herself,

There was part of her that did cry when she was eating something that once was beautiful in its own feathers or scales

She aches with empathy for the poor creatures who, through no fault of their own, have run into the darker side of humanity:

She sees pictures of other birds, no less wondrous than you, covered with oil and dying of suffocation and despair. How can they fathom what is happening to them?

There’s even a bit of Dreaded Comparison material in here, when Walker speaks of the “slob hunters” who trample through her peaceful country property:

The bucks were routinely hunted by…but Mommy can’t claim to know who these hunters were. They were people who shot the male deer, the bucks (young black men were called bucks and hunted when they ran away from enslavement in the Old South; Indian men were likewise called bucks and hunted for many years), and placed them over the tops of their cars as they drove back to the city—never noticing apparently how beautiful (left alive) was the being whose life they destroyed—often while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and eating candy bars. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers were some of the debris left behind.

Walker remains haunted by the fact that she had to kill chickens for food as a child. Growing up as a poor, rural family in the 1940s and 50s, the Walkers had no choice but to raise and slaughter animals to survive. I don’t begrudge them, or anyone in that situation, for taking animals’ lives. And while for the Walker family, killing was a matter of survival, not choice, they still suffered with human guilt over betraying the beings they had raised. The author calls the annual pig slaughter

A yearly routine for which her parents prepared with palpable dread. They were losing creatures they liked, creatures they’d talked to and at every day. They would be saying goodbye to personalities they knew, personalities who knew them.

She writes of neighboring dairy farmers who

told stories of how desperately the cows fought to keep their calves, how they tried to hide them after they were born. But where could they hide them? Only in the brush and forest so well known to humans.

And she wrote of her childhood connection to another animal her family reared for slaughter:

[Buddy the bull] seemed to her to have a quiet and pensive inner life. Who was Buddy? How would Buddy have designed his life? As a child she had asked this question endlessly. As a grown-up she had forgotten it.

Indeed, this “forgetting” is what enables Walker, like most people, to continue eating meat, even after it became a behavior of choice and habit rather than necessity. And thus begins a convoluted odyssey which had Walker waffling over her dietary choices clear through the end of the book.

While in India, she vows not to eat the flesh of any living creature, and when she accidentally bites into a chicken curry, she quickly rejects it. I was happy to see this, and was hoping it signaled the author’s transition to full-time vegetarianism. Later however, we have the chapter “Grandfather Gandhi-and Mommy’s Experiments with Reality,” which was by far the worst in the book, in my opinion. With this chapter we plunge into the tiresome rationalization of the “happy meat” movement. Yes, you’ve heard it all before: all the woo-woo BS about giving thanks to the animal’s spirit and stroking the head with one hand while plunging in the knife with another. And Walker catalogues all of her meaty “missteps”: chicken broth here, goat meat there. After a meditation on “friendly” killing, Walker speaks that such a scene

Reminds humans that though we must eat other living beings to live, we do not have to withdraw our affection when it is most needed and abandon our sustainers in the moment of transition.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, Alice. You are a bestselling author. You live in America, in one of the most vegetarian-friendly states of them all. Yes, some of human beings have no choice but to eat meat to survive, but for those of us who are comfortable and lucky enough to own land, vacation to foreign lands, eat out at restaurants, and keep pets—guess what. We have a choice. And when killing goes from necessity to personal choice, it also “transitions” to selfishness, no matter how many smiley faces we paint onto it. You know that. You no doubt have friends who have gone decades without eating animal flesh, and are both healthy and happy.

Later, she even trots out the old omnivore bingo:

Some people think it is enough that humans don’t eat meat, but this avoids consideration of all the animals murdered in their beds as land is cleared to grow veggies and grain. Grain and veggies, and fruit too, that you, my girls, and vegetarian humans enjoy.

Most people know it’s impossible to exist without unintentionally causing harm to others. Our choices may indeed have unforeseen consequences for other people, animals, or the environment we share. The best we can do is do our best, and be honest about it. However, wouldn’t we plow over far fewer animals’ nests if we weren’t to raise billions of tons of grain to feed the livestock we will later consume?

In all, however, The Chicken Chronicles is an important contribution to animal-focused literature, and will most likely cause many readers to ponder the lives and welfare of chickens for the first time. Folks who will never pick up a Karen Davis or Jeffrey Masson book will be drawn by the heavyweight literary fame of the author. Even better, this is a book about not eating a group of chickens as much as it about the chickens themselves. In a market awash in slaughter tomes from snooty foodies, that’s a refreshing and important thing.

[Booknblues · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And what is in your brain? What is your mind like? Has it been changed completely? Some humans think highly of big brains. They have done much damage to other creatures because they think their own big brain is of major importance and any being with a smaller brain is somehow deficient. I’ve never believed this. For instance, your head is small and your brain as well. Yet they both seem adequate for what you appear these days to enjoy most in life."

Writes Alice Walker to her chickens in her book The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses, & Babe: A Memoir. Alice loves her chickens and I loved reading about Alice Walker loving her chickens. This is a meditative philosophical book that is also much about chickens and sitting and watching chickens.

It really has been some time since I read The Color Purple, so I forgot how much I loved Walker's writing. It is so beautiful and in this memoir , we get to see inside her mind a bit and it made me think, I would love to have this woman for a friend.

I love that she just enjoys sitting and watching her chickens. I do this with my cats. We all go outside and enjoy the day and I sit and watch what they are doing. If I had chickens, I would sit and watch them as well. I have in the past had chickens, but I was not at the point where I would just sit and reflect.

Many readers have been a bit put off, when she calls herself Mommy to the girls( her chickens.) It doesn't bother me a bit, because, well, I am Mommy to my cats and I suspect many other women feel that way about their respective animals. She also anthropomorphizes them. My feeling is perhaps other people are degrading them.

Here is what she says when one of her chickens die:

The most important question we will ask ourselves—having long given up asking such questions of others—is “Did I love well?” After all, we’re the only ones who could know. I think an acceptable answer is: I loved as well as I could. What helps me with Babe’s death is that the day before, not knowing the future, I sat with her on my lap, stroking and admiring her. It delighted me that her experience of being a chicken on Earth among humans was a loving one.

I loved this book. I love animals and I think that is a must.

[Vanessa Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book at a tiny little indie bookshop in the Cabanyal neighbourhood of Valencia when we were on holiday last December and January, which seems like a lifetime ago now. I bought this book because it was written by Alice Walker, one of my favourite writers, and because I'd never heard of the book before. It wasn't until I started reading it that I realised it was a memoir and not a work of fiction. Despite the title, I didn't really expect it to be about real-life chickens. Truthfully, I honestly love that she writes about her chickens, creatures I did not know she tended or owned.

This a a delightful little read. Given the weight of this very heavily burdened world, Walker offered me a brief and welcome respite from those burdens in her musings on chickens. Some of those musings are rather weird for me or somewhat silly. But, the simplicity of sitting with chickens and watching and meditating on their actions and movements is incredibly appealing to me at the moment. This book is like a very long letter or series of letters to her chickens, and that's quite sweet in a world filled with too much sourness.

I envy her, and her chickens. And, now, I rather want my own chickens to tend and watch.

If like me, you need an escape from all that troubles you, this little book might just satisfy you. It did me.

[Sher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book because it was written by Alice Walker and it is about chickens- both liked. Maybe my rating is a bit more of a I liked it but..., because I had mixed reactions to the voice of the book and sometimes the subject. At times the writing was magical essay, and it was essay in that Walker made all sorts of interesting connections between chickens and her life. One of my friends thought I would like the connections Walker makes to spirituality, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, and that was true. I struggled with the book being written to the chickens, because at times this seemed to cutsey and felt inauthentic (for me ). The chickens were a subject for her to write around, and that was possibly a good idea. A memoir is general would have been of interest with a chapter on the chickens. Though, if you are a Waker fan, you'll probably enjoy - on some level-- spending time with this book.

[Andree Sanborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. It was enjoyable, it was a quick read, and it had Alice Walker's graceful prose. My favorite chapter, one which I may copy for reference in the future, is "Bearded Ladies," which ponders what I have often pondered: animals' lack of vanity and acceptance of their shape, size, and color.

But the book is predominately about Alice Walker — with some anecdotes about the chickens she raises. I learned a bit too much about Walker politically. I think Walker's lifestyle is one of rightly earned privilege and she is most certainly liberal. But she offends when she praises Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and other political activists. The stories of the activists are too complicated for one to blithely and simplistically adulate them. In doing so, Walker appears to sort people into two types: the good guys and the bad guys. Yet, I know she does not sort them so. It would have been a more enjoyable book if she had not made chickens a metaphor for world politics. But if she had, then she wouldn't be Alice Walker, would she?

My favorite quotes from the book:

If we choose one people over the other, forgetting there are peacemakers in each group, we risk harming people who are really our allies and friends.

I realized there is no reliable protection we can guarantee for another being, as much as we would like to do so.

Mommies can’t be everywhere. Only Nature can be everywhere.

May our call be from this day onward, to all the creatures and beings of the planet who have no voice: I have come to you, for you, to be a witness to your life and to extend whatever understanding and happiness I can.

[Lena · Rating 2 out of 5]

My mother couldn't finish the book because it was 'too weird' and I see now what she meant. Walker takes it off the deep end with this super new age-y collection of "memories" and hen house tales. She tries too hard to prove that she's something like a Buddhist who's connected, and loves everything including bullies and chicken sh**. It's boring and a bit much--if that's even possible. The scope of the book swings back and forth between Walker sitting with the chickens (contemplating the seen and unseen world as they eat the treats she gives) or in some other country thinking about those same chickens whom she calls her "Girls." Maybe the Chronicles would have been easier to swallow if she'd simply focused on raising these interesting creatures rather than using them and any instance of normal chicken behavior, as her means of illustrating the world as simultaneously abstract and sucky. Also, I'm hella disturbed by the fact that she acts more motherly towards those hens than her own biological daughter. But that's none of my business.

[Jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear.
The first 40 or 50 pages were a delight. I have my own hens and like Walker find much happiness spending time with them. They are wonderful birds with plenty of personality.

Then it gets odd.

Walker writes letters to her hens as she travels, refers to herself as Mommy, takes a tone you might use to a preschooler. Alice, you are not their Mommy. Just stop it, it’s infantilising and weird.

There’s an awful lot is spiritual woo-woo. There’s even a three page poem on the death of Michael Jackson calling him Saint Michael, which now looks so inappropriate I’m surprised she didn’t want it recalled and pulped. Instead of being a light book about the joys of having hens I anticipated , this is a self indulgent navel-gazing exercise in flakey spirituality and a bad anthropomorphic habit.

One star for the first bit, and one star for the chickens themselves.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt throughout this book that the author was describing my own experiences with chickens over the past several years. Her sense of wonder is beautifully expressed.

At the beginning of the book, she acknowledges others who are "... seeking a more compassionate world for those who have been, especially in the last fifty years, primarily objects of ridicule and previously unimagined cruelty." I wish more people would realize this and demand that we stop raising our food animals in filthy and inhumane factory "farms."

The book is full of wisdom gained from from re-connecting with Nature and the animals we humans had been living with for thousands of years. Unfortunately, I'm sure that referring to herself as "Mommy" undermined her credibility to many readers.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book really gave me pause. I love Walker's writing and she captures an awe of chickens I share with her. It is a bit disturbing, however, that many of the vignettes are about chicken death - especially early in the book and I found her reference to herself as 'Mommy' while writing these letters to her chickens incredibly annoying. At times her anthropomorphization is a little stronger than I'd agree with. There is also this weird kind of break about halfway through the book where Walker writes about the death of Michael Jackson and then shares a poem she wrote for him. She called it 'St. Michael' - no joke. I think the book, as a whole, feels more like a journal than a memoir and, thus, perhaps a bit too personal to Walker for the average reader to fully appreciate.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a stupid and pointless book. I wanted it to be about her chickens (I am a chicken mama myself with six brilliant, gorgeous chicken girls) but it was more about herself. And the conceit of writing letters to her chickens, and explaining things such as airplanes to them ("a plane is something exactly like a very, very large chicken"!) merely comes across as twee and appallingly ridiculous. I'd have felt sorry for the author and her pretensions if I hadn't grown to dislike her so much.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can't ever fault Alice Walker's literary talent, but might question her sanity when it comes to her chickens. I realize that much of this short reflection depended on the chickens to provide metaphors and life wisdom so maybe she is not really as besotted with her flock as it seemed(I have my own group of hens, but I don't write them letters signed Mommy). Anyway, there are some good observations about life in general and chickens in particular and it is a short read. Try it.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant
Reflections and memories of Alice Walker as told to her chickens.
Loved it.

[meganelizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

super relatable as I have my own flock but, Alice is constantly referring to herself as Mommy and it becomes extremely overbearing and sours this memoir. while having pets always is a lot of human projection, it felt really extreme and annoying by the end. lots of religious under tones. it was nice to hear someone else has ridiculous names and experiences with their chickens though and she does accurately depict that there is so much to learn from having feathered friends in your life.

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alice Walker decides to keep chickens but as a writer feels that she has to write about it too. It starts off well, after all, she is an accomplished writer but quickly goes downhill. Soon she is not writing about them but writing letters to them and it is all a bit quaint and also weird, I have a dog that I love but I certainly don’t write him letters when I go away. There’s also a section about the death of Michael Jackson, the singer. She calls him Saint Michael and laments his death in one chapter and then includes a long poem, 7 pages long, about him. Not really relevant to chickens.

[Heather Taylor-Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, quite simply, a memoir of Alice Walker’s time spent with and considering her chickens. It’s a love story for chickens and for hope in humanity, a generous commentary on connection. Walker isn’t interested in proselytising the many ways in which we’ve become disengaged in our relationships with both humans and non-humans – that isn’t her style in this small book (I read it in two sittings). In juxtaposing the simplicity of story and storytelling and the intensity of emotion, she invites us into her world of chickens with open, Buddhist-like arms. For me, reading this book was a lovely break from world-news-overload.

[Kandace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be reviewing this book in my August 31, 2022 issue of my newsletter. Sign up to receive your copy in your inbox www.tinyletter.com/ArtofKCF

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with Alice Walker on all her points, especially when it comes to animal rights, but I still loved this book. I don't think I've ever thought so deeply about the chickens in my life.

[Ladybugcain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't think this was going to be actually a lot about chickens (lol) but a cute read.

[Clare Russell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated it so skim read to get it over with
The great author of The Colour Purple talking to her chickens calling herself Mommy? Very odd