Friend, Catherine: Sheepish

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TWEETABLE REVIEW: 3.5* A pleasant memoir about life, knitting, & middle age on a Minnesota sheep farm. The take-away: buy wool undies. https://www.book-blog.com/2012/05/friend-catherine-sheepish.html

I've scarcely read anything in 2012 due to busyness on various fronts, but I did manage to squeeze in Catherine Friend's memoir Sheepish. The book is a pleasant enough read about the author's life on a farm in Minnesota, where she and her partner Melissa raise sheep and the occasional llama. It is an update on the sheepish goings-on that Friend first wrote about in Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn (which, however, I have not read). In Sheepish Friend discusses the sometimes dramatic business of farming, much of it having to do with lambing, as well as her forays into the world of knitting. Although initially resistant to the idea of joining the "fiber freaks," as she calls them, Friend winds up going whole hog, carding fleece and spinning her own yarn from her own sheep's wool and, of course, knitting it into socks. Friend spends part of the book questioning whether she wants to stay on the farm after fifteen years--part of a vague mid-life crisis she's going through which also finds her mourning the death of Elvis thirty years after his death. Friend's new-found a love of knitting winds up helping her through a difficult patch and renewing her affection for the rural life.

Friend writes a lot about wool in her book, its myriad uses and its qualities as a fabric: it's a natural insulator, it repels odors, it's durable, and so on. The main thing I'll take away from this book is the strong feeling that it would be a good idea to own some wool tee shirts.

Comments

[Clare D]

1.

'Fiber freaks' - very funny!

And congratulations on your 600th review!

[Debra Hamel]

2.

Thanks! It's hard to believe it's been just about nine years. Melissa was 1 when I started. Rebecca was 7. Crazy.