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Book cover detal of a woman next to a giant egg with chickens around
Spring 2024

Smashing success

The Egg and I tells the story of life on a chicken farm near Chimacum in the early days of Betty MacDonald’s first marriage. She was a city girl, a fish out of water, trying to make the best of her new reality and responsibilities on the rural and rugged Olympic Peninsula in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1945, she writes: “Then I gathered the eggs. Gathering eggs would be like one continual Easter morning if the hens would just be obliging and get off the nests. Cooperation, however, is not a chickenly characteristic and so at egg-gathering time every nest was … » More …