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feather_ghyll) wrote2023-09-13 07:26 am
feather_ghyll) wrote2023-09-13 07:26 am
REVIEW: Susan at Herron's Farm
Susan at Herron’s Farm: Barbara Wilcox, Spring Books, The Halycon Library
The longer this book went on, the more I realised it wasn’t just part of that subset of girls own career books, specifically the account of a sort of land girl, but a rum mixture of that and romantic suspense. A running theme is Susan, city girl become farmhand, falling, getting scraped, covered in mud etc and looking her worst, but we’re meant to take her seriously, and by the time she’s found the solution to the mystery of Herron’s Farm, she’s fallen in love, or, as its euphemistically put it in the title of the last chapter ‘Susan Grows Up.’
I suppose this book was written and published to try to attract young women to go work on the land. The details about farming life are fairly realistic – Susan learns to deal with various animals, with the tractor and how to milk, so that by the time nearly everyone else catches the flu and there’s snow, she’s fairly competent. The honesty about Susan always being hungry and far too thin at the start of the book was striking. You can infer that it’s set during world war two, with the talk of rations (for food, not clothes) and reserved occupations, the lack of men, and boys being desperate to join ‘the forces.’
Susan has come to a working camp in the country for the summer after her first year of university (for all that she judges people for appearing stupid, I was surprised that she'd matriculated, given that her maths skills seem terrible. In addition, she seems to lack common sense more than even me, and I’d never be daft enough to put myself forward for farm work.) Despite the fact that the farmer, Mr Herron, and his staff seem to turn pale and act surprised when they first see redheaded Susan, and despite the fact that he asked for a man (the majority of the students on the camp are female) Susan gets sent to Herron’s Farm. The way she gets treated there because of her appearance would totally have justified her never returning after the first day, but she does.
She’s mainly told and shown what to do by George, a right old misogynist who does things his own way, such as never calling cows by name, or referring to horses by any name that suits him. Nonetheless, he and Susan start to get along, and given that she gets into such scrapes, he is actually quite patient with her inexperience. But then again, Susan asks the other campers to cut off most of her red hair, because it seems to bother her boss so much! One day, when things go badly wrong, Susan yields to the sort of behaviour you’d expect from someone aged ten years younger than 18, and runs away and hides rather than face Mr Herron, who ranges from chilling to thoughtful. She then loses her temper when he finds her and quits.
But, at heart, she had rather fallen for the pleasant-looking farm and finds that she misses working there and the people once she is reduced to working for a day here or there on different tasks on different farms. An accident and Mr Herron’s kindness lead her back to Herron Farm, where she finds more clues about the mystery and enough humility to ask for her job back. The job became a greater necessity when the uncle who was funding her uni education gets into business trouble and can no longer afford to pay for her, and so she must earn for herself and her family, but she finds she enjoys working outdoors and with animals.
At this point, I had to adjust my ideas, no, there was no way that Mr Herron, who had always lived here, was Susan’s dead father and that she was somehow his long-lost daughter. There was no mystery about her birth, she was the oldest of several. So, by the time Mr Herron and Ronnie, another student Susan is friendly with, act in a way reminiscent of two bulls that got into a fight, I wasn’t surprised. Susan picks a side, and it’s the farmer, who isn’t as old as her peer Ronnie would have it. Having said that, I was very resistant to a romance where not only is the man several years older than the woman, but her boss, she reminds him of his dead wife, and in the main, she’s all right with him treating her badly. The author might be trying to sell that as a romantic ideal, but she’s no genius Charlotte Bronte pushing the equally dysfunctional Rochester/Jane. And when, along with Susan, we learn the truth about John Herron’s first marriage, well, the details reminded me of stories of women experiencing coercive control. The first Mrs Herron did die, after all.
The plot and quite what the heroine is conditioned to put up with are bonkers. The tone in which Susan relates all this to the reader is a bit odd too, and the author keeps introducing details that you think could have been seeded before as background detail instead of when the plot requires, even if that was trickier before the days of word processing. I was outraged that the people the camp owe money to for their milk are still going to have to wait even longer to get paid because Susan’s rival used that money to pay for her fancy clothes, but is only wrist slapped by her future husband for being an idiot. So, yes, come work on the land, girls, it's physical labour, but you too might find what this author seems to think is romance, and fresh food.
The longer this book went on, the more I realised it wasn’t just part of that subset of girls own career books, specifically the account of a sort of land girl, but a rum mixture of that and romantic suspense. A running theme is Susan, city girl become farmhand, falling, getting scraped, covered in mud etc and looking her worst, but we’re meant to take her seriously, and by the time she’s found the solution to the mystery of Herron’s Farm, she’s fallen in love, or, as its euphemistically put it in the title of the last chapter ‘Susan Grows Up.’
I suppose this book was written and published to try to attract young women to go work on the land. The details about farming life are fairly realistic – Susan learns to deal with various animals, with the tractor and how to milk, so that by the time nearly everyone else catches the flu and there’s snow, she’s fairly competent. The honesty about Susan always being hungry and far too thin at the start of the book was striking. You can infer that it’s set during world war two, with the talk of rations (for food, not clothes) and reserved occupations, the lack of men, and boys being desperate to join ‘the forces.’
Susan has come to a working camp in the country for the summer after her first year of university (for all that she judges people for appearing stupid, I was surprised that she'd matriculated, given that her maths skills seem terrible. In addition, she seems to lack common sense more than even me, and I’d never be daft enough to put myself forward for farm work.) Despite the fact that the farmer, Mr Herron, and his staff seem to turn pale and act surprised when they first see redheaded Susan, and despite the fact that he asked for a man (the majority of the students on the camp are female) Susan gets sent to Herron’s Farm. The way she gets treated there because of her appearance would totally have justified her never returning after the first day, but she does.
She’s mainly told and shown what to do by George, a right old misogynist who does things his own way, such as never calling cows by name, or referring to horses by any name that suits him. Nonetheless, he and Susan start to get along, and given that she gets into such scrapes, he is actually quite patient with her inexperience. But then again, Susan asks the other campers to cut off most of her red hair, because it seems to bother her boss so much! One day, when things go badly wrong, Susan yields to the sort of behaviour you’d expect from someone aged ten years younger than 18, and runs away and hides rather than face Mr Herron, who ranges from chilling to thoughtful. She then loses her temper when he finds her and quits.
But, at heart, she had rather fallen for the pleasant-looking farm and finds that she misses working there and the people once she is reduced to working for a day here or there on different tasks on different farms. An accident and Mr Herron’s kindness lead her back to Herron Farm, where she finds more clues about the mystery and enough humility to ask for her job back. The job became a greater necessity when the uncle who was funding her uni education gets into business trouble and can no longer afford to pay for her, and so she must earn for herself and her family, but she finds she enjoys working outdoors and with animals.
At this point, I had to adjust my ideas, no, there was no way that Mr Herron, who had always lived here, was Susan’s dead father and that she was somehow his long-lost daughter. There was no mystery about her birth, she was the oldest of several. So, by the time Mr Herron and Ronnie, another student Susan is friendly with, act in a way reminiscent of two bulls that got into a fight, I wasn’t surprised. Susan picks a side, and it’s the farmer, who isn’t as old as her peer Ronnie would have it. Having said that, I was very resistant to a romance where not only is the man several years older than the woman, but her boss, she reminds him of his dead wife, and in the main, she’s all right with him treating her badly. The author might be trying to sell that as a romantic ideal, but she’s no genius Charlotte Bronte pushing the equally dysfunctional Rochester/Jane. And when, along with Susan, we learn the truth about John Herron’s first marriage, well, the details reminded me of stories of women experiencing coercive control. The first Mrs Herron did die, after all.
The plot and quite what the heroine is conditioned to put up with are bonkers. The tone in which Susan relates all this to the reader is a bit odd too, and the author keeps introducing details that you think could have been seeded before as background detail instead of when the plot requires, even if that was trickier before the days of word processing. I was outraged that the people the camp owe money to for their milk are still going to have to wait even longer to get paid because Susan’s rival used that money to pay for her fancy clothes, but is only wrist slapped by her future husband for being an idiot. So, yes, come work on the land, girls, it's physical labour, but you too might find what this author seems to think is romance, and fresh food.