Lots of smiles in this one. She is great at her character descriptions. An enjoyable, quick read. ( )

I only had a vague impression of this book going into it: city girl becomes the reluctant wife of a chicken rancher in the mountains and relates the struggles of her first year, in the 1920's. What I didn't know until I opened The Egg and I was its setting: the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. And that's why I fell in love with this book. I grew up in Seattle, and have relatives in Grays Harbor, which is on the southern costal part of the Olympic Peninsula. So when Macdonald described the heavily forested mountains, the houses weathered grey with cedar shingle roofs, the damp and endless winter rain, the logging clearcuts full of wild blackberries, the choking underbrush of salaal, huckleberries and oregon grape, the smoked salmon and fresh-dug clams and little oysters- it was all dearly familiar to me.

Besides the familiarity of place, I loved this book because its writing is so frank and funny. The hardships MacDonald suffered were many- endless chores, lack of running water, a cranky old wood stove that failed to heat the house well; slovenly neighbors always begging for help and causing problems; bears and cougars wandering near the house; hundreds of baby chicks demanding attention every few hours; etc etc- yet she never lost her sense of humor, although it gets kind of bitter at times. Her descriptions of the Native Americans who lived on the Peninsula are disparaging, but I was able to glide past that prejudice and enjoy the rest of the book. Her neighbors are colorful: down one side of the mountain live the Kettles, lazy and shiftless with a yard cluttered with dead cars; on the other side the Hicks, neat as a pin and cooly cricital- both full of endless gossip. If you like memoirs about what life was like in the days of few conveniences, this one is a darn good read.

From the DogEar Diary ( )

Pat

This book was a hilarious page turner and every chapter was a delight to read. Betty MacDonald's descriptive talents are superlative and had me feeling as if I were there with her, rather than just reading about her adventures. I particularly enjoyed the episode in which she tells of her difficulties in getting hold of books to read, and of how her neighbours were of the opinion that 'reading was a sign of laziness, boastfulness and general degradation'! This was a fascinating read of farm life in the early 1900s, and Betty would certainly give Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pause for thought. ( )

A memoir of life deep in the backwoods of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. If the title sounds familiar, it was made into a Claudette Colbert/Fred MacMurray movie in the 1940s and then had spin-off movies featuring Ma and Pa Kettle. Reading the book, one can well understand the lawsuits brought on by MacDonald's former neighbors who thought they had been the model for the Kettles...with a partial exception of Ma, a fairly shiftless bunch of moochers.

The author's middle class upbringing had certainly done nothing to prepare her for life in the relative wilderness of no running water, no electricity and before-dawn to after-dusk labor. Her anecdotes about this life, while conveying the hardship, also reveal a deep sense of retrospective humor.

The story is quite amusing on the surface but there's a sad undercurrent lurking. Ms. MacDonald's husband, Bob, does not come across as the most pleasant man on the planet nor one who cares about his wife very much beyond her utility as a help around his chicken ranch. It didn't surprise me to read other sources that say he was an alcoholic and beat her, causing her to leave him and the ranch after four years. ( )