Review by Robyn Curtis
Deborah Hoskensin’s newest book, The Politics of the Back Porch, begins with a whimper and ends with a cry for help. Although her two previous works, The Hellride of the Archangel and A Farmer’s Dream, were both stunning displays of literary agility and emotional whirlwinds, her newest attempt falls flat, and then sinks further in shame. The supposed sequel to A Farmer’s Dream, Politics lacks the tension of the struggle for a woman to find her place among men in rabbit farming, and her main character, Eloise Smitherton, seems to have lost the verve that made her trials all the more gripping and her triumphs all the sweeter.
The book opens with Eloise contemplating the success of her rabbit farm while gazing at the statue of her beloved Poe, an American Fuzzy Lop that inspired Eloise to challenge the monopoly on rabbit farming in Montana. The prose, although full of lovely descriptions and wonderfully crafted, cannot relieve the stark sterility of the book and the wandering, disjointed plot that becomes more and more cumbersome with every passing chapter. Eloise teeters between chasing love or career; farming rabbits or, now that she’s proven her point, something more humane; going to the side of her dying grandmother or staying with her cancer-ridden rabbit stud, Eliot–difficulties that Hoskensin is unable to resolve after 200 chapters of effort.
