Hay Fever: How Chasing a Dream on a Vermont Farm Changed My Life

For those with dreams of starting over again in a bucolic countryside setting, Miller's account of her double life as a successful literary agent and owner of a Vermont goat farm is a bracing dose of reality featuring hard work, frustration and financial straits. In painful (sometimes monotonous) detail, Miller welcomes readers into the barn with tales of her education in farming and cheese-making, introducing them to the kid-birthing process, the problem of bloated goats, and some of her favorite animals. The intricacies of milking and cheese-making, dealing with temperamental equipment, and day-to-day drama among employees should prove informative (and cautionary) to gourmands and dissatisfied office drones considering a move to the farm, but she spends far more time on minutiae than general readers will have patience for. Her warts-and-all account even includes details of her financial struggles, but, strangely, gives comparatively little attention to her two-year stint as the manager of a small-town cafe, a missed opportunity to expand on her tale of entrepreneurship.