The \u201cFarm\u201d is a former elementary school converted to the campus of a Baptist women\u2019s recovery program. The author, who is Jewish, arrived there when her financial and social support networks disintegrated and she had lost custody of her children. Through flashbacks, Stone reveals that her once-happy life, full of middle-class creature comforts (\u201csoft bed with organic sheets\u201d), fell into shambles when her husband had a psychotic, alcohol-induced break. The author initiated divorce proceedings, but she didn\u2019t have control of the family\u2019s finances or a job to support herself and her kids. She also didn\u2019t have anywhere to live, and the Covid-19 pandemic meant she couldn\u2019t rely on friends and family to offer up their homes. After agreeing to sign over the house to her soon-to-be ex-husband and falling behind on rent payments (due to lack of financial support from her children\u2019s father), she was eventually forced to sleep in her SUV or crash at homeless shelters. These events lead Stone to apply to stay at the \u201cFarm\u201d; at this evangelical recovery program, she was singled out because she was Jewish and found it difficult to keep kosher or observe Shabbat. The memoir vividly captures the author\u2019s struggle to avoid conflict as a religious outsider among so many women who lacked emotional self-regulation. Unfortunately, the text is often repetitive, with many chapters hammering home the same points. On a sentence level, Stone often defaults to a formula of drawing out an idea by tacking on a series of sentence fragments (\u201cI know what is living in those unmoving bodies. Memory. Calculation\u201d) or relying on iterative phrasing (\u201cWe pass security. We pass the holding room with its lockers and piled belongings. We pass men leaning halfway into our path on the stairs\u201d). These stylistic choices tend to drag down the pacing and read as simultaneously abstruse and simplistic.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cFarm\u201d is a former elementary school converted to the campus of a Baptist women\u2019s recovery program. The author, who is Jewish, arrived there when her financial and social support networks disintegrated and she had lost custody of her children. Through flashbacks, Stone reveals that her once-happy life, full of middle-class creature comforts (\u201csoft bed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}