This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness — that belong to the nameless narrator of Brood. That is incidental. It is a novel about a miscarriage — ‘our baby had been a girl’ — and, because it is a novel about the loss of a child pretending to be a novel about chickens, it is a brilliant novel about chickens.
Tanya Gold
Bird-brained: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, reviewed
Polzin’s narrator, recovering from a miscarriage, tries to see life as her chickens do, for whom each new day is a ‘bright and solitary gem’
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