The great folks at Penguin sent me Susan McCorkindale's hilarious memoir, 500 Acres and No Place to Hide: More Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl
(NAL; August 2011). It is the follow-up novel to her first memoir Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl
and, like the first, it is really a lot of fun!
Born and bred Jersey Girl, Susan McCorkindale, was a high-powered Marketing Exec at Family Circle until her husband convinced her and their two young sons to move to a 500-acre beef cattle farm in Virginia. Life down South is verrry different than life in Ridgewood, NJ (how can a girl survive without a Starbucks or Bloomies for miles??) and Susan's memoirs chronicle the family's acclimation to their new rural habitat in side-splitting detail.I really enjoyed both of Susan's memoirs--she is self-deprecating like the majority of us and the jams she gets herself into are hilarious and strangely familiar (Getting chased by a herd of cattle on her morning run? Check. Dropping a ham on the floor, washing it and serving it anyway? Why not?) And while some may be turned off that Susan is a bit of a moneyed princess who does farm work in her Jimmy Choos, I just found her unwillingness to give up the Jersey in her made me laugh even more.
My only beef (haha--beef, farm, you get it?) are the million footnotes. I'm a lover of the footnote and comments in parentheses as you can tell, but even I felt some of Susan's were superfluous. So, a little editing of the footnotes would have been nice, but the books are enjoyable anyway.
The giveaway!
Penguin is generously offering a copy of 500 Acres and No Place to Hide to a lucky Rockland Mother reader in the United States! If you're interested in winning a copy of the book, please comment below before 11:59 on August 31st.
Good luck!
