“Dairy Goats and Cheese and So Much More”: a review of Jennifer Acker’s SURRENDER by Catherine Parnell

Surrender
Jennifer Acker
Delphinium Books (April 2026)
275 pages

In vivid and unvarnished prose, Jennifer Acker, author of the novel Surrender, chronicles life on a farm in rural Massachusetts. It’s a no-holds-barred narrative, gritty yet warm, and each character in the book is so fully rounded you’d know them if you meet them on the street. Acker’s knowledge and understanding of farm life, so well-researched, and her gentle authority, vibrate throughout the novel as farm owner Lucy struggles to keep her father’s family farm running. Dairy goats and cheese are Lucy’s passion, and in leaving her high-profile public relations job in the city, she’s determined to save the farm, build a better life – and maybe even make a profit.

The obstacles are many. Dementia is slowly claiming her scholar husband: “Something we both have chosen to ignore.” An investment decision has gone kaput: “The ground had fallen through.” Her farm mentor, Judy, is gone: “She was about the transfer of information and valuing every living being’s special properties.” And solar energy panels, unwelcome as they are in the area, pit the neighbors against one another. In Lucy’s mind, “Agrisolar apparently means setting up farm animals to graze under and around solar panels.” To further complicate matters, the solar power conglomerate is run by Lucy’s childhood friend, Sandy, a woman she hasn’t seen for decades. But she can’t resist the chance to reignite her friendship with Sandy, and the new and revelatory physical intimacy between the two is one of the book’s drivers. There, too, are obstacles, for the bulk of Lucy’s care and attention is focused on her goats. She may be wrestling with contemporary issues, but they are ones, albeit in different guises, that have plagued farmers for centuries. It’s a hard life and Acker doesn’t shield her readers from the physical and emotional challenges, and the need to swerve when catastrophe strikes.

Acker’s novel feels like a modern-day Willa Cather or James Herriot book – the attention to environment, animals, and life on a farm is distinctive. There’s a strong sense of place in Surrender, and the tension ramps up as Lucy engages in increasingly dubious efforts to save the farm and her dairy goats. She hires a young woman as her farmhand, yet the girl screws up time and again, to the point where Lucy’s exasperation leaks off the page. But she has no alternative, so she slogs along, although the odds are against her. She even goes so far as to let bygones be bygones with a fellow farmer.

The arc, plotline if you will, of Surrender, is the thematic insistence on personal adaptation, re-invention, and perseverance, a journey to the center of the self with shades of feminism. Moral compasses point one way, a solution to a problem, another, and Lucy struggles with her sense of what’s right and fair. As her husband disappears into the fog of dementia, Lucy appears with startling clarity and strength, an ode to diligence and inner vision. Acker tackles the subject in a way that touches on and reframes the old stories into something wonderfully new. Surrender is anything but, and in Acker’s hands, we see how brightly insight shines.

Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in The Compulsive Reader, Reckon Review, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.