SIX TO BREAK EVEN

Kin to The Egg and l. and this is the adolescent audience you kin jest aim fur. Mary and Charles Butler, Winnctka suburbanites with two bewildering offspring, inherit the two thousand acre farm of Charles' uncle Henry south of Zulu, Indiana. They attempt to make a go of it chiefly on weekends through the pre-World War II years, cope with a structure more depressing than the ""county poorhouse"" which is sometimes where they seem to be heading, pigs (it takes six to a litter to break even), a sad, stringy bunch of cows, chinch bugs, turkey poults, which send Charles to the hospital in an oxygen tent (pneumonia) and a steel corset. Experience teaches, profits come--and contentment--but so does a purchaser. About to give it up (reluctantly), they find Uncle Henry's ($300,000 in bonds) legacy he hadn't seen fit to trust to a bank....Farm fresh and funny all the way to elder daughter eloping with a herpetologist.