Gaining Ground

Roger Wayne's warm, lively reading of Forrest Pritchard's memoir of saving his family's farm in the Shenandoah Valley is a hopeful and conversational experience. Pritchard comes home from college with an English degree, a vague notion of selling firewood, and a skeptical father. Wayne conveys the absurdist humor as Pritchard chases escaped chickens around the yard and rescues the lid of his freezer that flies off on the highway, and Pritchard's father sells chickens from his Washington, DC, office cubicle. Pritchard's father is a wonderful character, and in Wayne's hands his complicated get-rich-quick schemes, taste for processed sugar, and loyalty to his son's dreams are dazzlingly larger than life. Pritchard is serious about his mission to bring grass-fed meat to farmers' markets, and that integrity is heard in Wayne's performance. A.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine