Annie's Reviews > The Farm

I was drawn to this book because of its description, but I really feel that it didn't deliver. I was expecting to read about the sacrifices that women make in regards to motherhood and money, and I was interested to see what Ramos did with race, as the protagonist is a struggling immigrant from the Philippines who is desperately trying to make a life for herself and her daughter. Instead, this reads as a "guilty pleasure" that is like an adult version of the novels I read as a teenage girl about catty cliques and boarding schools, except that these are grown characters and they're at a surrogacy "farm." The writing isn't altogether bad, but these characters are awful - they're conceited, vain, materialistic women, completely clichéd stereotypes that made for quite a dull read. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them, and I wanted to stop reading several times. Race is thrown around casually and often, but nothing constructive is done with it, though it very well may have been foregrounded. I wish that the narrative wasn't broken up by different characters either, as the third-person voice made this kind of organization completely unnecessary: there is nothing distinctive about them and the chapters all read in a predictable way. I wish that the focus was entirely on Jane and her story, and that she wasn't cast as a typical "immigrant" but had been more developed.


I received an ARC of this novel through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.