Rating: 4 out of 5

Genre: Contemporary, Diverse, 4 Star, Fiction

People who should read this: People who love books that make you ask questions, lots of grey area, and seeing the world differently.

“And suddenly she is exhausted. And Sad. A sadness so vast she feels like she is drowning in it… Because nothing is going to change.”

The Farm is one of those books that gets under your skin and makes you think a little differently about where the world is right now. 

I mean, we outsource almost everything - cooking, manufacturing, child care - how hard is it to outsource pregnancy? And it’s really hard to see the line between outsourcing and doing it because you can’t. Should a person that waited to have kids until their fifties not be allowed to procreate? Or is this just a concept for the rich, leaving the rest of the world to decide between their future and a family? 

The ideas between right and wrong can go on and on, which is one of the reasons that I really liked The Farm. Ramos doesn’t just point at a specific answer, forcing her will or thoughts on the reader. And after reading the book, I don’t think there even is a right or wrong answer. But that is the realness of life - the grey area. It takes a lot for a writer to stay unbiased and I really appreciate Ramos for pulling it off. It left a lot to talk about during book club, which is why I love to pick these kinds of books.

Though, on the flip side, the actual execution of the book left a lot to be desired. 

“Sometimes a person has no choice but hard choices…”

It’s becoming really frustrating to me that publishing houses feel the need to advertise books as something that they’re not. I was ready for a dystopian thriller about babies and being locked in a hospital, not… this. Which left me frustrated for the first half of the book. The book is weird and drawn out with so much time spent on the lives of the ladies outside of the surrogacy program. Not a bad thing if that’s what my mind was prepared for. It took looking back at the themes and what Ramos was going for to really see the importance of the book. But how many people will do the same thing I did? Or how many people are going to throw this book down? I blame bad ratings on the publishing house for this one.

So don’t fall for it people, this is not a dystopian thriller filled with mothers being forced to have babies.

It’s a book about immigration, classism, the rich and poor, and the idea of babies being a product for outsourcing - all very important ideas that should be talked about. 

Did I already say this is a great book club read? 

“But how many good, obedient Anyones truly make it in the world?”

Back to the story… There wasn’t much there. This was what writers would call a character driven story, though I was very impressed with the amount of conflict Ramos pulled out of thin air. I went along for the ride, falling in love with the characters, but I didn't have any expectations about the ending. Actually, there really wasn’t anything satisfying when I got there. Nothing was wrapped up and the reader had to piece together what happened to all the characters. 

And it was unanimously decided in book club that we had two very different books on our hands, meshed together because there wasn’t enough story for one of them to stand on their own.  You can’t talk about surrogacy without classism or immigration without classism, but the two don’t mess well together when the focus is supposed to be on pregnancies. Every time the other plot came up, I was frustrated. Add all this up with the very apparent editor changes to make the story what they wanted, and the whole thing has a pieced together disjointed feeling. 

Maybe The Farm is more along the lines of regurgitated histories. Read the author’s note and you’ll see that Ramos didn’t actually have any experience in what she wrote about. Not a bad thing at all - and who can say they’ve been through a surrogacy program. She talked to people and stored away all their stories creating the characters in the book. But that’s actually the way that it read. There was never a fully fleshed out feeling to the lower class characters. The rich ones had the most life. Which makes a writer really think about creating characters.

With all my annoyances and dislikes, I did really enjoy reading The Farm. It’s gotten under my skin and I don’t mind it. 

Happy Reading

Love Kait

Reading Challenge: 82/100