ON THIS HILLTOP by Sue Hubbell...

ON THIS HILLTOP by Sue Hubbell (Ballantine: $10). Long before the journal of the yuppie-ineptly-playing-farmer-in-Vermont became a minor literary genre, Sue Hubbell chronicled the problems of life on a honey farm in the Ozarks for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Moving from the sophisticated, urban milieu of Brown University to the small Missouri town where a friend tells her husband, “A woman needs a lot of tuning before she handles easily” required a lot of adjustments, and she describes the switch with humor and insight. Unlike many recent authors, Hubbell doesn’t bore the reader with second-rate Erma Bombeck tales about letting the coffee pot boil over or discovering that farm animals smell. Instead, she explains that her lack of preparation and mechanical skills are actually minor problems: Farm life remains difficult because it relies on potentially unreliable machines, temperamental animals and unpredictable weather. “Hilltop” provides an entertaining prelude to Hubbell’s critically acclaimed “A Country Year” and “A Book of Bees.”