In ‘Barn 8,’ a Plot to Steal a Million Chickens

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. BARN 8 By Deb Olin Unferth At the heart of “Barn 8” is love, specifically the longing that comes from missing someone you love, and how that love can, if catalyzed, move the lover to do great things. Great things like hatch a plot to steal a million chickens. Unferth’s gift as a short story writer is evidenced in this novel, her second: Within moments of being introduced to these characters, we know them intimately, care about them deeply.

First, we meet 15-year-old Janey Flores, traveling by bus from Brooklyn to Iowa to meet her father for the first time, a man her mother had long told her was nothing more than a sperm donor. “She should have figured out she hadn’t come out of a vial. What woman gives up and goes baster at 18,” she thinks. “In other words her mother … had lied.

” Janey suspects the error of her decision the moment she steps off the bus, and her suspicions are confirmed when she meets her father, sees his dingy apartment and discovers that he’s always known she was out there and never bothered to find her. Suddenly, she understands why her mother left, why she lied. Though “Janey and her father lived like strangers in that apartment,” still she stays, mostly out of spite. The “old Janey,” the one who went to school and lived with her beloved mother, Olivia, in their cozy brownstone, and the “new Janey,” already “deadening” in this place where the wind is always “yammering over the fields,” become two separate people, living “Sliding Doors” lives.

This heartbreaking rift only deepens when an accident leaves Janey stuck in this new life forever. The narrative throughout often moves outside of linear time, zooming into alternate pasts and certain futures, and to great effect. Next we meet Cleveland, an idealistic, if disillusioned, auditor for the Iowa layer hen industry for whom Janey’s mother babysat, as a teenager, 21 years ago. Olivia taught Cleveland to fall in love with the world, and “then she vanished and that was that.

” So when Janey shows up back in Olivia’s hometown after all these years, Cleveland, still mourning her disappeared caretaker, gives Janey an auditing job that would “change the course of her life forever,” out of a sense of duty to the woman who changed hers. The two women’s devotion to Olivia and her legacy is also at the root of their decision to steal — no, “remove,” or “rescue” — a million layer hens from Happy Green Family Farm. To pull off this harebrained scheme they enlist the help of a small crew: Dill, an animal rights activist in a crumbling marriage; Annabelle, the daughter of egg farmers and Dill’s former co-investigator, and her spurned ex-husband, Jonathan, who still works in the egg business. They’re not alone, however; hundreds more have heard the rallying cry, and support the fight.