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Zusatztext 90528254 Informationen zum Autor HOLLY ROBINSON, an award-winning writer, has been a contributing editor to Ladies’ Home Journal and Parents , and her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Good Housekeeping, and More , among other publications. She lives in northern Massachusetts with her husband and their five children. Klappentext "What kind of Navy officer sits on his ship in the middle of the Mediterranean dreaming of gerbils?” That's the question that Holly Robinson sets out to answer in this warm and rollicking memoir of life with her father! the world's most famous gerbil czar. Starting with a few pairs of gerbils housed for curiosity's sake in the family's garage! Donald Robinson's obsession with the "pocket kangaroo” developed into a lifelong passion and second career. Soon the Annapolis-trained Navy commander was breeding gerbils and writing about them for publications ranging from the ever-bouncy Highlights for Children to the erudite Science News. To support his burgeoning business! the family eventually settled on a remote hundred-acre farm with horses! sheep! pygmy goats! peacocks-and nearly nine thousand gerbils. From part-time model for her father's bestselling pet book! How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils! to full-time employee in the gerbil empire's complex of prefab Sears buildings! Holly was an enthusiastic if often exasperated companion on her father's quest to breed the perfect gerbil. Told with heart! humor! and affection! The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter is Holly's ode to a weird and wonderful upbringing and her truly one-of-a-kind father. Leseprobe Chapter One Mail-Order Gerbils One cloudy Monday afternoon, I came home and found my family gathered in the garage. I'd been pedaling my bike around the neighborhood after school, pretending that the bike was a horse I was racing around the cul-de-sacs. I'd ridden so hard through the soupy Virginia heat that my short bangs were glued to my forehead and my knobby knees were shaking as I dismounted the bike and walked it up the driveway. My brother Donald raced outside when he saw me. Donald was eight years old, skinny and quick and so blond that he looked bald in most lights. It didn't help his looks any that Mom buzzed his hair like a Marine's, which only called attention to the fact that Donald's head was so long and narrow that everyone, even our parents, called him Picklehead. "Dad got boxes from Air Express," Donald said. "Now he's opening them!" I dropped my books and lunchbox down on the cement floor of the garage and went to stand between Donald and my mother, who carried my little sister, Gail. We stood close together in the dim oily cave of the garage and watched in silence while my father-a methodical man who never went anywhere without a list, a map, and a pocketknife- unpacked the boxes with his usual precision. As Dad slid out the contents of that first box with the help of a metal ruler, I saw that it was a plastic cage with a wire top. The wire top had two dips in it, one for a water bottle and the other for food. Dad held the cage high up like a holy chalice to admire its contents. Through the opaque bottom of the cage, I could make out two dark, round shadows that skittered this way and that. My mouth went dry with excitement. "What do you think of them, Sally?" Dad asked. Mom wrinkled her nose. My mother was thirty-two years old that summer, but she often dressed in shorts that showed off her figure and tied bright scarves over her short brown curls. She was girlish and lovely, like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, but without the scary violet eyes. "They look like rats to me," she said. "Look at those awful tails." "What are they, Dad?" Donald asked. "Gerbils." There were four cages in all, in four separate Air Express boxes. The process of meti...
