Brood : a novel /

In Polzin's witty and profound debut, an unnamed narrator reflects on her flock of chickens and her dwindling hopes of becoming a mother. As the unnamed narrator and her economist husband, Percy, work to keep their four chickens alive through a year of extreme Minnesota weather, Percy is in the running for a professorship at a university in California. While Percy awaits job news, a move that would necessitate leaving the chickens behind, the narrator processes the loss of a miscarried child. With their odds for having a child growing slim ("I had hoped to outweigh the risks of pregnancy at my age with sheer desire," the narrator muses), the couple turn their attention to the birds, "an endless source of entertainment and worry." What astounds is Polzin's ability to draw such deep understanding of the couple through their interactions with the chickens, which live only in the moment: "Do the chickens think of warmer times? They do not. By the time a snowflake has landed, snowflakes are all a chicken has ever known. Theirs is a world of only snowflakes or only not." The narrative is full of such sharp, distinctive observations as the narrator works to move on from her desire to have children. Told in short vignettes studded with breath-catching wisdom, this novel feels both delicate and sustaining from beginning to end. Agent: Molly Friedrich, the Friedrich Agency. (Mar.)

In Polzin's debut, a woman finds solace in a charming, albeit hapless, flock of chickens. Polzin brings us into the fold of her introspective novel by introducing a cast of chickens. Next comes her nameless narrator. The chickens have names, but they're irrelevant. The story here has nothing to do with the chickens but rather with what they offer a woman silently reckoning with a recent loss (spoiler: It's not eggs). "A chicken knows only what it can see," our narrator muses. They also "die suddenly and without explanation" and only want what is necessary to survive. "I want something that will not end in disappointment," she thinks to herself. Despite being married, having a handful of friends and a quasi-present mother, she's left alone with a lot of time to rehash the trauma of her recent miscarriage. Percy, her loving yet abstracted husband, is around but too preoccupied with waiting to hear from a prestigious university about a potential job to stop and notice. Her friend Helen, a real estate agent and new mother, provides an escape from time to time, letting the narrator clean her listed properties before they're shown--a task she gratefully obliges to, approaching each job with "the steely reserve of a doctor." "I polish and shine with a frenzy indistinguishable from rapture," she says. Grieving a role she felt destined to fill, our narrator turns from the intangible and immerses herself in the tactile, including the feathered, clucking company of her birds. Calling to mind the cerebral works of Olivia Laing and Jenny Offill, Polzin's story has a quiet intensity that churns throughout. It's in the tension she builds within her narrator's isolated world, navigating the paradox of domestic intimacy, the comfort and terror it sows, and the unexpected shapes motherhood can take. There are no heart-quickening plot twists or climactic endings here, and that's the beauty of Polzin's writing. It doesn't need either to move you. In Polzin's deft hands, the mundane is an endless source of wonder. A moving meditation on loss, solitude, and the hope that can rise from both. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.