She manages to get herself into scrapes with washing machines set adrift in rowboats, used cars, and a $25 Turkey Squasher. As usual, humorist MacDonald is her own favorite target. Writing in the 1950s, Betty MacDonald, sophisticated and urbane, captivated readers with her observations about raising a family on an island in Puget Sound.
The bestselling author of the American humor classic The Egg and I continues the adventure with this collection of tales about life on the fringe of the Western wilderness. Luckily she had her sister Mary batting for her, and catapulting Betty into one hilarious situation after another, while she watched safely from the sidelines. With a failed chicken farm and marriage behind her, Betty was desperate to make a living in a country without any jobs. This book takes up Betty's story before she'd had any success as a writer - when she went back to live with her mother. One would suppose that during the Depression there wasn't much to laugh about in America. The result is a lively, cheerful and most funny book. Of course she had her bad moments when despair and tragedy underlying what she saw and heard refused to be pushed into the background, but she had the grit and wit to rise above it. Humor was her greatest medicine, right up to the day she left the sanatorium, cured. Betty MacDonald always had the ability to face up to adversity - and heaven knows she had enough in her life - so after the initial shock had passed, she proceeded to laugh at her illness, the other patients, the nurses, the doctors, and - chiefly - herself. And what if she did not recover? Hardly the basis for comedy, one would suppose. It meant entering a sanatorium for treatment, leaving her family, her children. A terrifying word, as terrifying then as cancer is now. Yet through every trial and pitfall-through chaos and catastrophe-this indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor.Īn immortal, hilarious and heartwarming classic about working a chicken farm in the Northwest, a part of which first appeared in a condensed serialization in the Atlantic monthly. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild.
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