In Joanne Ramos’ new novel, The Farm,  healthy, beautiful and financially desperate young women are pregnancy surrogates living at the Golden Oaks medical campus. The mothers-to-be have housing, healthy meals, high-quality medical care during their pregnancies. They’re only permitted occasional well-supervised visits off the baby farm, and required to wear tracking bracelets every day. Pregnancy is business on the farm, and the surrogates will receive huge, life-changing payments after delivering a healthy baby. It’s not too far-fetched, just scroll Craig’s List for paid egg donation.

The novel also shows the future mothers, who are unable or unwilling to carry their own children for a variety of reasons. Without revealing too much, because discovering the characters and motivations is a real pleasure in this novel, I’ll say that I was expecting the tragic-infertile trope, and I was pleasantly surprised by the range of reasons women used The Farm.

This book explores race, money, motherhood, and more, while remaining a story first, and a treatise second. I was mildly disappointed in the ending, because I felt like so many intersecting lives and major social themes had been explored, and so I really wanted to see some systemic change, but of course that’s not very realistic fiction.