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Review Amazon.com
Ninety-year-old Irene Leahy has devoted her entire life to one patch of land in upstate New York, and she's not about to leave it just because she's grown old. At the age of 17, after her father's early death, Irene was left to run her family's sheep farm in Carniff County. The young Irene took to farm life with a vengeance, chopping off her hair and learning to breed prize rams. Fierce, capable, and independent, as a farmer she was a force to be reckoned with. Now, in her old age, friends want her to sell her land and move into a nursing home--a suggestion she welcomes about as warmly as a case of the croup. In her journals, Irene responds by chronicling the particulars of her long and hard-working life, from the rigors of lambing to the rhythms of the changing seasons. In telling Irene's story, sheep farmer Ann Mohin has written a first novel that's by turns wise and wistful, elegiac and earthy. Long on imagery but short on plot, The Farm She Was succeeds admirably as an ode to the beauties and hardships of a vanishing way of life.
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