Flat Broke With Two Goats

by Jennifer Mcgaha

Overview

When life gets your goat, bring in the herd

Jennifer McGaha never expected to own a goat named Merle. Or to be setting Merle up on dates and naming his doeling Merlene. She didn't expect to be buying organic yogurt for her chickens. She never thought she would be pulling camouflage carpet off her ceiling or rescuing opossums from her barn and calling it "date night." Most importantly, Jennifer never thought she would only have $4.57 in her bank account.

When Jennifer discovered that she and her husband owed back taxes—a lot of back taxes—her world changed. Now desperate to save money, they foreclosed on their beloved suburban home and moved their family to a one-hundred-year-old cabin in a North Carolina holler. Soon enough, Jennifer's life began to more closely resemble her Appalachian ancestors than her upper-middle-class upbringing. But what started as a last-ditch effort to settle debts became a journey that revealed both the joys and challenges of living close to the land.

Told with bold wit, unflinching honesty, and a firm foot in the traditions of Appalachia, Flat Broke with Two Goats blends stories of homesteading with the journey of two people rediscovering the true meaning of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781492655381
Publisher:	Sourcebooks, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Sales rank:	133,837
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

2017-10-17
A couple's massive tax debt leads them to move to a cabin in the North Carolina woods.McGaha began not with a romantic desire to return to the wild but with a foreclosure on the suburban house she and her accountant husband were buying from friends and a bill from the IRS for unreported back taxes in the six-figure range. Her determinedly upbeat memoir follows the couple and their dogs to a run-down cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina. The setting was idyllic, but for someone used to the pleasures of upper-middle-class living, the housing situation was less than ideal. The house, filled with the "thick, pungent odor" of mold, had green camouflage carpet "on the ceiling," a barely functioning bathroom, countless mice, and a constant influx of snakes attracted by those mice. McGaha gradually forgave her husband for lying to her about their financial situation, and she achieved some happiness with the purchase of a few goats and chickens. She learned how to make goat cheese and breed the goats, with a few misadventures along the way. While she describes her experiences with the animals in vivid detail, the narrative often rambles. A long section about her life with her abusive first husband seems to have been shoehorned in, and she glosses over some of the deeper problems the author and her husband created for themselves, their college-aged children, and their friends. Many of the recipes that conclude the chapters are not detailed enough to be useful, particularly the one for Crock-Pot goat milk soap, which involves "9.56 ounces 100 percent pure lye" and some unspecified "protective gear." The book also includes a reading group guide.McGaha offers plenty of detail about life with a tiny herd of goats, but readers will finish the book with more knowledge about the outer lives of the chickens, goats, and dogs than the inner lives of their human owners.

Kirkus Reviews