Maggie, the character at the center of Claire Boyles’s debut novel, Appraisals, is sure of many things, and top among them is that she is a farmer. As someone who descends from at least three generations of farmers, I do not find her surety surprising. It is a truth unquestionably accepted in my family that either you have the calling, or you don’t. My grandpa, dad and brother did, while I did not. Just one of the qualities that make Maggie’s determination admirable is her commitment to an occupation that contracts around the male gender. My grandma, at ninety-one, likes to remind me that my grandpa didn’t want women in his barns, so it’s difficult to tell whether any desire I might have had to farm this land was subsequently conditioned out of me.
And it’s not as if the boys’ club culture is the only obstacle to farming. The novel starts with a single chapter in the early ’90s from the point of view of Flora—Maggie’s grandma who raised Maggie after her mother’s death—as Flora loses their farm to the Farmers Home Administration because of accumulated debt. Yet, “those were the years that had made [Maggie] want to be a farmer . . . the years she and Flora had worked the old place. The honor-system farm stand they’d kept stocked and ready. The cash from the Folgers can that always added up to more than they’d offered for sale, proof that their neighbors were still looking out for them, despite what Flora believed.” Not easy years, as Flora tells it. No small farmer, male or female, would say farming is easy, so thank goodness there are people like Maggie who walk straight into the challenges. When her husband’s family’s land comes up for sale, they take out a loan, and she starts her sustainable vegetable and meat farm.
The farm begins to support itself, but the rest of Appraisals is set during the Great Recession. Maggie’s husband Fish, who is also the third point of view, has lost his landscaping job and is offered one at the local oil and gas company. While this new job is a windfall to Fish—he can finally support his family and Maggie’s farm without needing to work on it—Maggie and their daughter Ozzie believe he is compromising their ideals and what they stand against: capitalism and climate change. Maggie has spent energy and money carving out her dream of an occupation, against the other farmers who believe “vegetable farms weren’t real farms,” against the dryness of the Colorado plains and against the oil and gas companies polluting and using the water. So when Fish makes his announcement, all Maggie understands is that he’s switched sides.
Appraisals is as much about compromises in a marriage as it is about the compromises of farming and beliefs. Rotating among the three points of view allows for a capacious vision of Maggie and Fish’s marriage. His actions seem reasonable: he enjoys getting a paycheck that can buy his family phones, and he feels the rush of confidence at being good at something instead of remaining below Maggie’s stronger ambition. But Maggie refuses to concede to his explanations, to the idea that he might be changing, while their daughter, despite her climate change advocacy, gradually becomes accustomed to the new situation and makes the weekly journey between her parents’ two places. Claire Boyles’s writing glows within the gaps of this relationship, and she keeps raising its stakes, pulling the couple impossibly apart so that I equally wanted them to attain their individual wants and to stay together.
When it comes to farming, Maggie seems to have a more greyscale outlook:
Her CSA customers sometimes talk about organic and conventional farming as an us-against-them proposition, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. Plenty of conventional farmers thought as hard as she did about the impact their operations had on the land, considered what they were giving back to the soil as much as what they could take from it, cared to coexist with coyotes and grasses and larks. . . . The difference between good farmers and bad was how they stewarded land, whether and what chemicals they used only one piece of that puzzle.
But understanding never leads directly to practicing, and one of Fish’s biggest jabs at Maggie is her moral superiority. I think Maggie’s tunnel vision is the result of her farming, her full-bodied and whole-life effort. To keep her small farm alive, she fights, against the banks, the weather, the limits of time and season, and has become accustomed to a fighting stance, though it’s not always the best solution.
In some ways, Appraisals is about the lifespan of ideals, and how they (the landlords and corporations and billionaires and climate change) eventually wear it down, which is another way of looking at compromise. But it’s also about the fight against these power structures and the necessity of remaining adaptable, of community. The night in college when Maggie met Fish, she told him, “I want to farm as a way to keep society from collapsing.” A youthful ideal and an impossibility in terms of scale. Though when the scale reduces to Maggie’s town, there is possibility: the community organizes against a billionaire’s development, and there’s the extra cash found in the food stand’s coffee can. Maggie’s fight then passes down to her daughter, who participates in her own version of climate advocacy. I’m not sure what my grandpa would think now that several women work in his barns, but of course it doesn’t matter since they’re not his barns anymore. The other thing about ideals is that they’re often urgent and change is slow, generation over generation.
FICTION
Appraisals
By Claire Boyles
W. W. Norton & Company
Published August 4, 2026
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