I suspect that the right reader would adore Walter Pritchard Eaton’s Idyll of Twin Fires, which is nothing like as ridiculous as the title makes it sound. I’m not the right reader, so I don’t know for sure, but I thing he or she would be pretty into gardening and possibly also farming, and probably wouldn’t find the first person narrator deeply unlikeable.
Again, that’s not me. But even so, I basically liked it. Sure, the protagonist, a young instructor at Harvard who quits his job and buys a farm, is pretty irritating. Sure, the romance takes over the plot of the book for a while and then steps back, leaving weird pacing in its wake. But there’s also this lovely thing where nothing particularly bad happens. In fact, not much happens at all. I mean, people plant seeds and paint walls and things. And plants grow. But there’s no disasters or drama or anything, nor is the book super boring.
So, yeah. Not really for me, but not bad at all.
