A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres [Hardcover]

Joseph Monninger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

The beauty of the New England countryside, the joys of forming a new family, and the adventure of renovating a nineteenth-century barn come together in Joe Monninger's warm and evocative memoir of home and hearth. When the author and his black Labrador, and Wendy and her eight-year-old son, move into a 6,000-square-foot barn in New Hampshire, they fall in love with the building, not realizing how much work it will take to remodel--let alone heat--their new home. While building a fence, putting in a garden, renovating the house, and exploring the land, the author finds his family's new life rooted in the area's old traditions, learning the history of covered bridges and New England's witchy past. They discover the best way to trim the grass (sheep), the delight of moving a 14-foot Christmas tree into their living room, and the spooky fun of holding a seance for Halloween. With the charms of New England front and center, this endearing memoir captures the pleasures large and small of making a new place your own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gleaming like the sun hitting the 6,000-square-foot barn that gives Monniger's life and the book its mooring, this polished memoir follows the seasons, beginning in winter when Manning and his partner, Wendy, first see the New Hampshire barn that becomes their home. As they transform the summer residence into a year-round house, the book combines the fix-it elements of the public television series This Old House with a meditation on family, as Wendy and her eight-year-old son, Pie, move in with Monninger and his black Lab. Occasionally, this novelist (Mather, 1995) and nonfiction (Home Waters) writer's metaphors pile up like too much snow (a breeze is described as "cool brooms of air"). But many are vivid and unusual, as when he relates "the storm made me feel like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs." Sometimes, too, Monninger gets overly elegiac, especially when it comes to barns, whose sacredness he compares to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Generally, though, Monninger's prose, like his life, is homegrown and deceptively simple. He and Wendy celebrate the news that their offer on the barn has been accepted by roasting marshmallows with Pie, their "traditional Friday-night fare." Monninger collects sleds, builds an igloo with Pie in the backyard and oozes curiosity about his environment, sharing details on everything from the history of the nearby Baker River to a wood pile that needs cobbing. Together, Monninger and Wendy (she's actually the handier of the two) insulate their new home, add coal-burning heaters and, with the help of 70-year-old handyman Clarence, learn to love country living.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Like John Marchese's recent Renovations [BKL Ap 1 01], this memoir is less about home improvement than it is about discovering a lifestyle and, by association, forging an identity. When the author and his companion bought an old barn in New Hampshire and decided to turn it into a home, they knew they were in for a lot of work. Not only was the place huge (Monninger asks us to imagine 50 Cadillacs in 10 stacks of 5 each to better visualize the main living area), it had no heating system, no insulation, juryrigged electrical wiring, and an inadequate septic system--not to mention the fact that, over the years, the barn had settled to one side and was no longer level. Monninger and his partner encountered the usual setbacks on the road to making their barn livable, and their plans changed accordingly. They expected some of that, but what they didn't expect were the changes they would make to themselves. In quiet, reflective prose, Monninger describes how they became part of a new community as they settled into centuriesold traditions, learned the history of their little bit of New England, and learned, as so many have before them, that a home is more than a building with some stuff in it. This is an utterly charming story, told with grace and insight. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; 1ST edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081182974X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811829748
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creating a Life, June 27, 2002

By 

Deborah Hogan (Billerica, ma) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres (Hardcover)

I just completed the relishing of Joseph Moninger's , A Barn. Agreeing with anothers veiwpoint of too much flowering descriptions I ignored a few choice lines and skipped to new paragraphs; yet with respect I know I would never have enjoyed the parts I did read if they had not been described with such love and experience. I am one of those "wanna be barn owners"; ever since I was eight years old and watched the people two streets over gut, renew and live in this massive building with huge windows and sturdy walls. I fell in love. Amongst all the eloquence this book offers; it is the underlying theme; the reason I did not read it, that leaves me speechless and in awe. It is in the storyline that Monninger weaves the secondary and yet primal thread of family and the fact, as he states, that he realized that he and Wendy were creating thier son's past. What a beautiful, thought provoking, loving and spiritually filled knowing. As they were focused on integrity during the ever present process of renewing this structure; they also were creating sustanance, substance and stablitiy for Pie. My son is twenty-three and if I ever get another opportunity to go around with him again; I pray that I rememeber that once we become parents; however that is gifted to us; that in our present we are creating our childs past.

If you read this, Joseph Monninger, Wendy and Pie; thank you.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Meditation on Love, Family and Nature, January 7, 2007

By 

Siddhartha Banerjee "Siddhartha Banerjee" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres (Paperback)

I bought this book several years ago from the bookstore at Winterthur Gardens and Galleries, the Du Pont estate, in Wilmington, Delaware. I have read, and re-read, this book more times than I care to remember, which is more than I can say for some of the best-selling gardening or nature books in my library.

Some people write about nature with authority, some with wonder, and others still with love. Monninger does all this and more. His tone is reminscent of Wordsworth who was detached observer of nature and smitten lover all at once. Contrast Wordsworth with Shelley's awe-struck and hushed ruminations on nature, and you will know at once what I mean and, perhaps, better identify Monninger's unique voice as a nature writer.

But this is more than a book about nature outside us. It is also about the ecology of relationships - between a man and his dog, a man and his wife, and a man and his son, and, not least, about their collective relationships with one another as they settle into their lovely home, a barn, in New Hampshire. The self-help books are full of techniques about making marriages and child-rearing work. I couldn't help thinking, after reading this book, that perhaps the secret of a rich and stable family life is really quite simple: one needs two things: a shared vision of the life the family wants and then the shared burden of working towards it. So, even when there are nice paychecks, a handsome roof overhead, and a kitchen bursting with all the bounties of food, a family can still fail, except not really. Families do not fail. They just stop trying to work together. When I need to reawaken to this simple, yet profound truth, I read Monninger again and invariably, I am rewarded with a new raft of insights on love, family and nature.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A New Yorker in a Barn, February 22, 2002

By 

Joshua Robey (Hollis, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres (Hardcover)

I grew up in New York City, but have lived for the past 10 years on seven acres in a semi-rural part of New Hampshire. I am also in the process of building a barn (next to the house the we actually live in). So when I saw this book, I had to buy it.

However, within a few chapters I was starting to have some concerns that Monninger was missing the point, and the more I read the more it was confirmed. What he has written is a New Yorker's view of life in New Hampshire. When I got to the point in the book where he describes how he used to live on Central Park West, I understood my concerns, but also really lost touch with the book.

He describes expansive fields with levels of gardens and myriad flora and fauna. In my mind's eye I was picturing a real expansive New Hampshire farm, but then I was drawn back to the fact that he is talking about three acres, abutting on the town school. Three acres is a lot of land in Manhattan, but if you live in New England for a while you will understand that it is just a back yard. Monninger catalogs every plant and every bird he finds, with the child-like glee of someone who has never seen nature before, but he is so lost in the details that he can't get beyond that fact that he is writing a New Yorker's view of New Hampshire for other New Yorkers.

I also found it annoying that he does not describe the impact of having on job on his ambitious renovation project. It would be great if I could have the amount of free time that he seems to have, both to spend with family and work around the house. It comes off as an idealized view of life, and does not describe the realities of what he has undertaken. He also makes a few attempts to add local color and local history, and I feel the book would have been better if he had had more of that.

From a literary standpoint, he really does overdo the metaphors and descriptions, but I can imagine how difficult it must be to accurately convey the feeling of spring in New England, or the size of a large structure. He would do better though with more description and less attempted poetry.

I can see how this book might be an interesting read for someone in a large city imagining life in the country, but it is not really an accurate or well written portrayal, and it left me, now a committed New Hampshirite, frustrated.