Book Reviews
Early Reviews for Keeping Watch
“Like a knitting project that cannot be put down, Keeping Watch sweeps the reader into a compelling engagement with small-scale farm life. The author deftly spins fibers and story, and her strong, warm, and resilient characters, both wooly and human, will linger as a welcome presence in your heart.”
Cat Bordhi, author of A Treasury of Magical Knitting
“Kathy Sletto unravels the bucolic dream in Keeping Watch: 30 Sheep, 24 Rabbits, 2 Llamas, 1 Alpaca and a Shepherdess With a Day Job, an amusing living-la-vida-fauna memoir in which lambs think they are children and llamas go rogue.”
Vogue Knitting
“People’s stories about their pets are often about as entertaining as detailed accounts of their dreams, or of sitcom episodes you didn’t see. Ho-hum. Guess you had to be there. But in Keeping Watch: 30 Sheep, 24 Rabbits, 2 Llamas, 1 Alpaca, and a Shepherdess With a Day Job,” Kathryn A. Sletto manages to make her animal stories compelling, funny, poignant and sometimes genuinely sad. . . It doesn’t hurt that she has a gift for comic pacing, spinning her tales with just enough exposition, description and touches of Minnesota color.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The world would be a more cheerful place if we all lived in Sletto’s neighborhood so that we could witness in person the antics of her flocks, both animal and human. Reading this book is the next best thing.”
Suzann Nelson, author of Growing up Lutheran
“Living the Dream: This year-in-the-life look at animal husbandry is sure to interest knitters who’ve had the idea that producing their own fiber animals would be fun . . . and the heartwarming stories in Keeping Watch will make knitters who are so inclined feel the tug of an agricultural life.”
About.com: Knitting
“Keeping Watch: 30 Sheep, 24 Rabbits, 2 Llamas, 1 Alpaca, and a Shepherdess With a Day Job,” takes you through the seasons of a year on the farm and introduces the reader to many of the animals, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues, and their delightful and humorous anecdotes that reveal their distinct personalities. Among the characters you’ll fall in with Lamb Chop, the lamb with an identity crisis who prefers humans and dogs to sheep; Tony, the humming alpaca with a passion for newborn lambs; and Steve, the wayward rabbit who is ever escaping from his cage, only to be found mimicking road kill alongside the drive. From drought to breeding issues, challenges arise with Kathy working to veer the farm from financial loss. As the year closes and winter settles in, it’s clear that she values their small farm lifestyle and all it entails. Readers will be crossing their fingers that they’re in business another year.
Des Moines Cityview: Central Iowa’s Independent Weekly
“In her farm memoir Keeping Watch, Kathy Sletto recounts the long days of numbingly hard work, the abject financial realities, and the hands-on management of the back ends of various animals. But she clearly loves farm life, and in her anecdotes, which channel the emotional insights of James Herriot and the practicality of Mother Earth News, she makes small farming seem like a good idea – or at least a lot of fun.”
MinnPost
“Delightful critters ‘star’ in Keeping Watch: Like snowflakes, no two dogs or cats or any other animals are alike. Each has its own unique personality. Anyone who doubts that statement should read Kathy Sletto’s book, Keeping Watch. Hot off the press it’s a real hoot from the first page to last. . . Keeping Watch is a lively – often hilarious, sometimes sad – account of her decision to become a full-time shepherdess, the difficulties she faced, the joys and pitfalls along the way, and – most of all – it’s a story of the most entertaining menagerie of critters you’re likely to come across this side of Dr. Doolittle. . . . The result is Keeping Watch, a finely written book by a woman who knows her subjects through and through. Like all people living in the country, Sletto is a keen observer of nature’s ways and seasonal changes, which she describes so vividly you are there in the seasons, right with her and her animals. . .That supreme novelist Leo Tolstoy had a knack for writing about animals, even just in a sentence or paragraph, that brought them as alive on the page as his human characters. Sletto has that same rare knack. Her many animals, even the minor players, are so vividly unique the reader is in constant suspense about what goofy, wonderful antics they’re going to surprise us with next. This is one of those rare books that has you grinning ear-to-ear as you’re reading it.”
The Newsleaders