Millie's Boy continues the use of the turn of the century southern Vermont setting that Robert Newton Peck introduced in A Day No Pigs Would Die. The earlier book was a bit of family history; it described isolated rural life in a residually Shaker community, and delivered a heavy dose of ruralism somewhat on the order of descriptions that Homer Croy might have written years ago, but colored by an overly sentimental examination of the boy narrator's psychology. Even worse was the effort to turn...

["A Day No Pigs Would Die" is a charming and simple] memoir in the form of a novel about the author's upbringing in the Shaker tradition on a Vermont farm in the 1920's. Indeed so perfectly fused are the understated rhetoric and action of Mr. Peck's story that if it achieves the popularity it probably deserves, it will seem ripe for the kind of parodies that Richard Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" has lately been getting. For so determined has Mr....

I fear [A Day No Pigs Would Die] is ruinously sentimental, and that the extent to which it affects … you, or me, is a measure of how much more time we all ought to spend cleaning out the chicken coop. The book is told in the voice of the boy, but, in the manner of a children's book, it is full of dialogue and images that are too clever by half, that let the author's self-approval show through. "Hear me, God," the boy cries at a climactic moment. "It's hell to...

Inside almost every American and quite a few Europeans there's a farm lad trying to get out. The young dream of a machine-free life and organic bread, their elders of traditional American values and home-cooked pie. Robert Peck is writing for them all [in "A Day No Pigs Would Die"]…. In showing just how earthy farm life is and how stoic a farmer and his children must be Mr. Peck spares us nothing. Vivid animal mating scenes, butcherings, a cruel economy that forces a boy to help ...

Robert Newton Peck has wasted few words in this modest and affecting little book ["A Day No Pigs Would Die"] … about a 12-year-old boy who learns some hard but useful lessons…. "A Day No Pigs Would Die" has been promoted in the style of "True Grit" and "Addie Pray," and probably it will appeal to readers who are hooked on easy nostalgia. But there is more to it than that. It is sentiment without sentimentality—no easy feat—a...

Robert Peck proved himself a master of the genre [of reminiscence] with his moving and engaging book, "A Day No Pigs Would Die," based on his own boyhood in rural Vermont during the twenties. With "Soup" he is back again for another go-round, but this time it doesn't work nearly so well. Soup is the name of Peck's best friend when he was a boy. Between them, one or the other is consistently drawn into mischief…. Several of the stories are funny, and one or tw...