Merrily Farm: A Fable

Linkiewicz builds Sugar Bush Knolls with the loving specificity of someone who actually knows New England towns — the Moxie-drinking porch elders, the leaf-peeper economics that raise prices every September 15, the general store fused to the jail fused to the fire department. That texture makes the human plot (Percy's grudge, Merilee's practice, George's quiet courtship) feel lived-in rather than sketched, and it earns the fable's real payoff: a fully imagined barnyard society layered on top. The Curtis-as-legend sequence is the book's best invention — a 750-pound hog treated with mob-boss gravity ("Break my trust, and you end up in my trough") while cats, rats, and a rooster negotiate territory like a tiny UN. That world-building extends into voice: Herschel and Reuben, the Bronx crows, land some of the sharpest comic dialogue in the manuscript — "Like the Empire State Building is just a nice two-bedroom condo on Thirty-Third Street" — and their Yiddish-inflected patter gives the barnyard scenes a rhythm that's genuinely funny rather than merely cute. Dolly's solo trip into town, rendered through her wide-eyed internal monologue ("Oh, wait . . . that's me!"), is a lovely bit of animal-fable craft that trusts young readers to enjoy dramatic irony. The human-world chapters lean on stock small-town-bully-vs-town-heroine setup, but the animal ensemble is where this book finds its true, distinct pleasure — a farm with politics, hierarchy, and comedy all its own.