FRESH EGGS

The perils of factory egg-farming are on gothic display in Levandoski’s third (after Serendipity Green, 2000) as an Ohio man goes to transgressive lengths to save his fourth-generation family farm.

Calvin Cassowary is only 24 when his father dies and responsibility for the farm falls to him, but he’s young, in love with brown-eyed Jeanie, and uncowed by the prospect of a quarter-million-dollar debt, the cost of getting a new 60,000-hen operation up and running. When daughter Rhea is born, prospects look only brighter. But five years and another 150,000 chickens tell a different story: Jeanie dies of cancer, and Rhea is starting to show an affinity for the downtrodden poultry masses in the laying barns. At the urging of his corporate parent, Gallinipper Foods, Calvin continues to expand, but Rhea’s repressed horror at the brutality of factory egg production manifests itself unmistakably—she starts growing feathers. Hiding them from her father and her allergy-ridden new stepmother is easy enough until she reaches puberty and the occasion of her first training bra exposes her secret. Many specialists and a shrink (the effervescent Dr. Pirooz Aram, from Levandoski’s previous novel) later, Rhea is fully feathered and fully secluded, an embarrassment to her parents. Calvin, with a million hens, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy when America’s appetite for eggs decreases. Then a lawsuit comes from a neighboring subdivision that’s offended by the smell of poultry. Desperate for cash, Calvin starts dragging Rhea to county fairs as “Rhea the Feather Girl” but soon finds himself facing child-abuse charges and national headlines. When Gallinipper steps in to spin it all as a publicity stunt, Rhea takes matters into her own hands, vanishing in order to find the only cure for her condition.

Part freak show, part corporate satire, part the successful study of a family in crisis—from a distinctive literary voice deserving to be more widely known.