REAL FARM <i> by Patricia Tichenor Westfall (Avon: $7.95, illustrated).</i>

The yuppie return-to-the-land book has become an increasingly popular genre, but Westfall avoids both the cliched rhapsodies on the beauties of land and the Erma Bombeck jokes about her inability to hammer a nail. She and her husband seem singularly ill-prepared for the life they chose, converting a played-out Iowa farm into a hardwood plantation: “Decoding sounds was a shared challenge for us, both city kids--Mark the New Yorker, me the Chicagoan. Our training taught us to distinguish bus from dump truck, not oriole from goldfinch.” Their agricultural experiment brought home the importance of compromise: Despite a commitment to an ecologically correct life style, the novice farmers soon learned they had to use herbicides to control the competing weeds or their seedling trees would die. Unable to accept the deviation from his principles, Mark eventually quit the project. Westfall’s commitment to farming outlasted her marriage, and her efforts to continue caring for the trees became a metaphor for the journey to greater maturity and self-reliance.