(I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.)

The anecdotes in this book — because it is a collection of stories, rather than a continuous narrative — are entertaining, but the narrator is pretty passive in most of them, letting her husband or children take the lead, which diminished my sympathy for her. There's also quite a bit of overlap and repetition in some minor details from chapter to chapter (which are possibly collected from the blog she mentions, so perhaps the repeated context was in the original post and just left in), and there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason behind the order of the stories, both of which I found just a little bit annoying.

Still, Stocker manages to paint a pretty vivid picture of the rural lifestyle and especially the transition from city living, keeping in mind both the pragmatic and romantic aspects of it all.