While I blocked all mentions of Farmville from my Facebook feed as soon as I realized that I had that power (duh), I do like farms in real life. Very much so. And in snowy, gray February, who doesn’t long for a warm-weather visit to a real working farm, a sunshiny stroll among the baby lambs (*swoon*) and happily wallowing pigs and chickies and such?

Then again, children’s lit is, of course, lousy with farms. There are enough tractors and cluck-clucks and benevolent, overall-clad farmers to make you long for anything BUT the pastoral setting for your story-time travels. I have spent the past year of my life mooing and neighing and baaing, surely more than I have in the past thirty-odd years combined, and there’s more to come. But have I begun hiding all farm tales behind the couch? Nah. I’m cool with farms.

Here we have two groovy farm-related books, one new, one published a few years ago.

Jarret J. Krosoczka’s PUNK FARM tells the story of some rockin’ farm animals—cow on drums, sheep on vocals, chicken on keyboard, goat on bass, and pig on guitar—who kick out the jams all night long. As the band prepares for tonight’s big show, their farm animal fans line up around the barn, waiting to show IDs to the bouncers (that would be the horsies). The band is a big hit, belting out—you guessed it—a rendition of “Old MacDonald,” and ending with a true-to-life, “Thank you, Wisconsin!” The next day, Farmer Joe is bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to work; the animal rockers are much more bleary.

The paintings are lively, colorful, and cartoonish in a child-pleasing way, and while I don’t know about your kid, mine snaps up any opportunity to belt “EE-I-EE-I-O!!” repeatedly. But I can’t help feeling that the book misses some great opportunities. There are so many silly directions you could go with the conceit of a farm animal rock band, right? Instead of much of the story being devoted to several verses of that familiar song, the band could’ve cranked out farm-takes on some classics, hung out backstage with some pretty heifers, and slamdanced (”Careful with the horns, dude!”). And considering that this book came out in 2005 and features a bovine percussionist, I was pretty surprised that a “More cowbell” joke didn’t show up as a wink-wink moment for the parents. And you kind of have to wonder why the concert wasn’t billed “LIVESTOCK”…and so on. Still, it’s a very fun concept, and not just another baby-animals-on-display title.

A totally different sort of farm music can be found in the just-released OUR FARM: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary, by Maya Gottfried and fine artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch. Gottfried imagines the voices of various animals, then lets them narrate the sweet, mostly free verse poems that make up this book. Take the beginning of “Freedom!”, by J.D., a piglet:

I’m free!
And I’m running, and I’m running,
and oh, I can feel the sun on my snout.
There goes a fence post!
(…)

Or this haiku, by Barnaby the rabbit:

See me in the grass?
Maybe I will hop to food…
Or go sniff pansies.

Barnaby, J.D. and the other animal “poets” on display in this lovely book (the lamb on the cover makes me swoon a little every time I look at it) are real-life residents of Farm Sanctuary, a shelter for neglected and abused animals, and a portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the organization, which “works to end cruelty to farm animals.” Gottfried captures the animals’ characters—shy, gentle, twitchy, docile, frisky, playful, wise, and so on—in her poems, and their personalities seem equally realized in Zakanitch’s watercolor and ink paintings, which blend into and are accompanied by rough pencil sketches on bright white pages, bringing to mind a young artist’s sketchbook full of inspired doodles dancing with more finished pieces. The whole book feels carefree and springy, artful in a loosey-goosey (sorry) way. (I will not be at all surprised to find it on prominent display at Anthropologie.) It’s nice, too, to see farm animals’ genuine nature represented—the wary eye of a rabbit, the curious gaze of a goat—rather than the ubiquitous anthropomorphic take. I’ll be reading this one to Thalia, living vicariously through the warmth its pages exude, until we can get out and take some farm tours of our own later this spring. . .

Visit the book’s Facebook page.