It’s got book-club hit and bestseller written all over it, even before you clock its media-friendly author ... it’s the very nowness that makes The Farm such a haunting read ... Ramos has crafted a real page-turner that combines all the hottest issues of the day: inequality, race and women’s battle to reclaim their bodies from commodification by big business, with the eternal questions of how much we can sacrifice before losing ourselves completely. She is eloquent on the little intimacies of gestating a baby and the upstairs-downstairs dramas between rich white ladies who feel guilty about everything and their nannies who must debase themselves without making their bosses feel sorry for them. The result is an entertaining novel that is also a serious warning.
Joanne Ramos’s thrilling but flawed debut novel is a colonisation story set inside Golden Oaks, a baby farm in Massachusetts ... The Farm reads not so much as dystopia, but as a plausible next venture for a capitalist ruling class that has grudgingly opened its doors to women and must now contend with the problem of fertility and motherhood ... The most beautifully realised character is Evelyn, an elderly Filipino baby nurse and caterer whose complex motives give her the kind of impossible moral struggles that immigrants actually face ... Evelyn’s community of Filipino women is richly rendered and engrossing ... She has the acute gaze of the immigrant girl made good. Her book is a necessary one – we need a mass-market novel that shows the impact of colonisation, with flawed white people failing to save the day. But The Farm has a problematic ending ... The Farm is a great read, but storytelling comes with responsibilities, especially in such times.
The Farm may be an 'issue' book, but it wears the mantle lightly. It’s a breezy novel full of types (the Shark, the Dreamer, the Rebel, the Saint), and veers, not always successfully, from earnestness into satire. That shift in voice can obscure the novel’s intent — though to be fair, ambiguity may be the point ... Ramos’s characters articulate both sides of the surrogacy argument ... Some of its sharpest scenes are those skewering the rich ... Yet Ramos also lingers indulgently over the trappings of the wealthy, to the point where reading this novel felt a bit like watching several hours of reality-TV luxury porn. So The Farm isn’t not a critique, but it’s also not an indictment ... The novel’s too-neat ending won’t provide satisfying answers. But the stage is set for lively book chat.
The novel’s effectiveness lies in the power of its premise ... Although The Farm has too many digressions and sometimes makes its points too obviously, Ramos still does an excellent job posing complex questions surrounding surrogacy, immigration, capitalism and more.
The social commentary is blistering but at times gratingly, unnecessarily explicit, stating its thesis through characters that sound like they’re talking at us instead of to each other ... The Farm is best when it focuses on the characters and trusts us to pick up on its deeper themes on our own ... It’s forgivable, though, that the book is so eager to make its point. Because what’s so striking about The Farm isn’t that it imagines a frightening dystopia ... Its very plausibility is a warning shot.
... crammed with acutely observed scenes that place reproduction within an intricate web of class, gender and race ... While such social ambiguities are finely etched, the plot dithers even after Jane gets to grips with Mae’s connivance. It may be unfair, however, to chastise Ramos for lacking the grand guignol audacity of Atwood, if her story is pointed much closer to home ... doesn’t present a full-bore dystopia so much as occupy an uncomfortable space between now and the near future: if such an ultra-elite surrogacy venture doesn’t exist already, it surely will soon. In fact, the villain in The Farm is arguably unfettered capitalism.
... might serve only as an echo-chamber treatment of The Handmaid's Tale, were it not for author Joanne Ramos's deft way of creating characters. She peoples her book with figures who are appealingly engaging — or, at times, engagingly repellent ... The circumstances of Mae's existence, the privilege, the grasping for prestige, are impeccably, savagely drawn ... If there is a hitch in the telling of this tale, it's that Ramos presents such a sunny picture of the Farm, the reader might feel an urge to check right in ... Some novels are born with book club DNA, great narratives that can also spur energetic discussions. Debate will rage around the treatment of the young women at the Farm, but the novel's complex mélange of personalities brings a somewhat improbable story stirringly to life.
...not so much an answer to 'what if … ?' as it is an incremental—yet more-than-incrementally disturbing—projection of a future just beyond the world that we have already wrought: a near-future parable of where our free capitalist market in human babies might take us. As such, Ramos’s tale is properly cautionary ... despite the temptations lurking within Ramos’s larger scaffolding—which seemingly pits Clients against Hosts as 'haves' versus 'have nots'—The Farm does not devolve into oversimplification.
The Farm doesn’t always make it easy to classify who exactly is the oppressed and who is oppressor, and this is one of the book’s strengths ... by the end of the novel it seemed to me that Ramos hadn’t quite picked a side, ideologically. At times, The Farm reads like an explicit critique of capitalism; at other times, it’s more like an apologia. Some elements of the plot seem transparently designed to increase tension or introduce an argument that Ramos wants to sink her teeth into ... Which life takes precedence: the Host’s, or the baby’s? Can the client block the Host from undergoing chemotherapy if it would harm the fetus? This is good stuff, and Ramos plumbs both sides of the questions with sympathy and insight. Yet, it is all resolved too quickly ... one gets the impression that Ramos hadn’t quite figured out her own thinking on the matter ... Even so, her ability to explore the nuances of these questions in the first place—in tight, spare prose, with well-placed plotting, no less—makes me hopeful that Ramos will pen another book soon.
Ramos covers a lot of ground, from the delicate yet transactional relationship between a mother and her nanny to the struggles and financial motivations of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The novel also examines the ethics of surrogacy and boldly challenges the idea that America is a meritocracy. The Farm is a timely investigation of how much control we really have over our own situations ... With glimmers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and the dystopian eeriness of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Farm is equal parts entertaining and creepy.
Ramos’ debut is so engaging that the reader might not fully understand the depths she probes until the book is done ... each character’s complexity will give book groups plenty to discuss. An alarmingly realistic look at the power of wealth and access buoyed by clear, compelling storytelling and appealing, if not always likable, characters.
Perhaps the most powerful element of this debut novel by Ramos...is its portrait of the world of Filipinas in New York. The three-page soliloquy of instructions for nannying delivered to Jane by her more experienced cousin is a work of art in itself. Excellent, both as a reproductive dystopian narrative and as a social novel about women and class.
Ramos’s transfixing debut scrutinizes the world of high-end surrogacy with stinging critiques and sets up heartrending dilemmas ... Ramos particularly shines at her nuanced, emotional depictions of these women’s interior struggles ... this striking novel will also appeal strongly to readers who like dystopian touches and ethically complicated narratives.
