Barn 8

Written by Deb Olin Unferth

Narrated by Brittany Pressley

Janey and Cleveland are two auditors for the US egg industry who go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million
chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm’s worth of animals. They assemble a precarious, quarrelsome
team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. It doesn’t go as planned.

In her most powerful work yet, Deb Olin Unferth tells a wildly inventive, unforgettable heist story, with one million
nonhuman consciousnesses at its center. Funny, philosophical, heartening and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks:
What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking
ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama that could have been written
by no one else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781980052562

Reviews for Barn 8

[bjellis_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sparkling writing. I stayed with this girl the brilliant concise descriptions, the ability to write equally well about love and comedy.

[booklove2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Using an omniscient narrator with brief chapters, the reader gets to see all aspects of the biggest chicken heist of almost a million chickens, on not even the largest egg farm in Iowa. I feel that the omniscient narrator was the way to go here, but at the same time you can't really delve into any of the characters here very well. The book starts with Janey and I liked the thoughts on the different versions of her, how each choice can so hugely make a life veer off course. Janey becomes an auditor at egg farms because her mom knew someone who does the same work. Then her boss happens to pick up one chicken wandering down the road. It all unravels from there. But then we move to the perspective of undercover animal rights investigators before the heist, then the farmers, security guards, park rangers, etc, then far into the future for a brief moment, which was interesting. I wonder how ridiculous a book fully from the perspective of the chickens would have been?! But this book is not that and I liked it well enough.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Barn 8 starts with the central character of a teenage girl, Janey, full of all hat teenage angst and I thought I may be reading a YA novel, don’t get me wrong, I’ve read YA novels that were above my pay grade and simply brilliant. I have also read “literature” that would be called shite if it was penned by anyone else.

So the young girl gets off to a bad start which only gets worse, rapidly and dramatically. In no time at all she is somewhere else entirely living in a place and way that was inconceivable just weeks prior.

In this new place she discovers what she calls “the new Janey” which also carnates “the old Janey”. Sometimes she wonders what the old Janey would doing now, in that old life that previously she found detestable but now, the new Janey realises, was actually pretty bloody good. You get the drift.

So really you have this young girl thrown into a completely different situation that she is unprepared for in almost every way and like it or not, adulthood is unfairly foisted on her too. And not just adulthood, but a disappointingly bland, low expectation type of adulthood that she had not even susoected could exist.

Somewhere in all this she falls into the footsteps of her dead mother and meets a pivotal character that brings the whole thrust of the novel into being.

Set somewhere in the mid-west (I think, but not being American cannot say with accuracy). If not geographically in the mid-west it is certainly in the spiritual and cultural mid-west where not much changes, and while the horizon may be huge the options for the living is nowhere near as panoramic. Sameness, blandness, low self-expectations and a few old hippies.

I guess you could call this a coming of age story and in some ways it is but it is something else again. It is slightly fantastic but not unrealistically so but definitely has a lot going on.

I have no idea why I picked it up but I’m glad I did.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Barn 8 was overall a very fun and engaging read. The waxing poetic about chickens was so good and deeply weird. In terms of waxing poetic on the natural world the only way that I can compare it - it was like Richard Powers The Overstory but Chickens. I really wish there was more story / chapters from the pov of Bwuaaak. Barn 8 centers around the broken characters that make up loose group of animal rights activists whose lives line up to a singular event: Chicken Heist. Free the chickens from the farm. Along the way Deb Olin develops interesting and quirky characters from a wildly refreshing third-person angle. The novel is so original and well written and just a joy to read. Its a given you have got to be on the side of animals to enjoy this one. I cant really see someone coming from the other-side of the aisle really enjoying this book unless they are very open minded. But who cares what they think. The chickens don't. Deb Olin's Barn 8 Is fun, philosophical and beautiful.

[lynsey2-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quirky and wholly original.