Hay Fever

April 19, 2010
For those with dreams of starting over again in a bucolic countryside setting, Miller's account of her double life as a successful literary agent and owner of a Vermont goat farm is a bracing dose of reality featuring hard work, frustration and financial straits. In painful (sometimes monotonous) detail, Miller welcomes readers into the barn with tales of her education in farming and cheese-making, introducing them to the kid-birthing process, the problem of bloated goats, and some of her favorite animals. The intricacies of milking and cheese-making, dealing with temperamental equipment, and day-to-day drama among employees should prove informative (and cautionary) to gourmands and dissatisfied office drones considering a move to the farm, but she spends far more time on minutiae than general readers will have patience for. Her warts-and-all account even includes details of her financial struggles, but, strangely, gives comparatively little attention to her two-year stint as the manager of a small-town cafe, a missed opportunity to expand on her tale of entrepreneurship.

April 1, 2010
Maybe it was all the years spent treating her clients with kid gloves that convinced influential literary agent Miller that she could be a goat farmer. Maybe it was Vermonts pastoral contrast to Manhattans frenetic pace. Or maybe it was the sensuous delight she got when tasting a fine ch'vre at a four-star restaurant that cajoled her into adding cheesemaker to her r'sum'. In actuality, all three circumstances coalesced, resulting in Millers purchase of the historic Consider Bardwell Farm where she, her husband, and their dynamic staff discovered by trial and error how to raise a substantial herd of Oberhaslis goats, produce tons of award-winning cheeses, and learn a few midlife lessons in the process. Combining the heartfelt observations of a mature woman who has had it all but can still handle more with the hard-won education earned by keeping a mercurial enterprise functioning in an economic maelstrom, Miller shares both practical and personal information about the inside, and often insidious, world of todays boutique farm community.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)