Science writer Liese Greensfelder's memoir, Accidental Shepherd, gives a wry, affectionate account of the unexpected year she spent managing a remote mountain farm in Norway. Eager to learn about agricultural practices, Greensfelder traveled from California to Norway in 1972 to spend the summer working with a farmer named Johannes Hovland. Upon arrival, she discovered that Johannes had been hospitalized following a stroke. He asked 20-year-old Liese to watch over the farm for a few weeks--which turned into months. With help from her new neighbors (but no modern machinery), Liese plunged into the tasks of milking, caring for livestock, maintaining the farm, haying, and weeding Johannes's prized garden. Over the course of the year, she fell deeply in love with her new community of Hovland and its kind, hardworking people, who taught her to speak kvammamaol, their dialect of Norwegian, and generously shared their knowledge.
Greensfelder's narrative celebrates the beauty of western Norway and its mountains, meadows, fjords, farms, and remote cabins that were once frequented by budeier--shepherdesses who cared for free-ranging sheep and cows. She describes the farm's never-ending work, her deep sense of responsibility to Johannes's animals, and her growing confidence and skill. Amid the backbreaking work, however, Greensfelder also found joy: in summer hikes, cross-country skiing, local dances, and deep friendships with her neighbors, who answered her endless questions and embraced her as one of their own.
Packed with details of farming life and peppered with Norwegian vocabulary, Greensfelder's memoir is an intimate portrait of a vanished region and an evocative tribute to the community she came to love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams