We feel we are the only people who really understand her, and she rewards our understanding; this is one of the pleasures of reading well-written first-person novels. "Brood" is the sort of book that is inevitably called quiet. For me the book feels accurate. There are anecdotes here that illustrate life but have no effect on events. We live in a golden age of accurate fiction. Not realism — this could happen — but accuracy — it probably did happen. I don't mean to suggest anything at all about the author and the inspiration for the book, only that the focus on the quotidian feels exceptionally lifelike to me. I don't dismiss accuracy in fiction. Many people love it. As a reader, I happen not to particularly prize accuracy in and of itself. The thoughts of this narrator moved and intrigued me without fail; still, I would rather read about disaster than discomfort. I would rather read about arguments than agreeability; I like it when characters struggle with one another on the page. Quite early on I understood that, in "Brood," nothing terrible or dramatic would happen to anybody who wasn't a chicken; the terrible thing had already happened, was informing, in its way, daily life. I'm not proud to say that I felt disappointed. There isn't a single thing in "Brood" that I don't believe, including this: that one woman, faced with loss, might look upon chickens with increased tenderness, hope, meaningful worry. People behave symbolically all the time. Even so, another woman, faced with a similar loss, might be unable to find the death of any animals, least of all chickens, all that meaningful ever again. This is not the fault of the women, fictional or actual or critical. It's not the fault of the chickens. Art is powerful and can do a lot, but it cannot do everything. That's fine. It barely warrants a mention, except here, apologetically. I am that second woman, who is reviewing a novel about the first woman, and I am sorry. I admired the chickens but constitutionally am unable to mourn them. Any novelist has had the experience of being reviewed by somebody who simply wished that the novelist had written a different book. Not a better book — those reviews are painful in a different way, like a published photograph of you in your own underpants from an unflattering angle — but an entirely different one.