Aged 15, Janey Flores discovers that she has a father, and that he lives in Iowa. She leaves New York to visit him and, to spite her mother (who should have told her the truth much earlier) stays with him for two months, even though she can’t stand the man. While she is away, her mother is killed in a car crash, and Janey finds herself destined to remain in ‘big ag’ country with a father she hardly knows. She gets a job as a ‘layer hen consumer auditor’ alongside Cleveland Smith, who used to be babysat by Janey’s mother, and the unlikely duo hatch an even unlikelier plan – to liberate a million chickens from one of the farms they audit.
Thus begins a tragi-comic escapade that exposes the horrors of the US egg industry and humans’ uncanny tendency to mess everything up – from relationships to bird heists to the stewardship of the planet. As one of the hapless animal rights activists observes, the stars are the only objects humans can see and not destroy.
