Jessica Mansour Nahra
Review:
When I started this book my first thought was this is going to be about a baby factory type ‘farm’. I wasn’t far off.
Tense and fast paced, I couldn’t put this down.
I had moments where I literally said out loud ‘OH’, moments that made me smile and moments where I wanted to skip quickly over the gruesome descriptions.
With her relatively new partner James, Leila is overjoyed to find out she is pregnant. James is beside himself with love and happiness at starting a family.
A love story..
But when Leila miscarriages the grief is so profound. With James so tender and loving she finds herself propelled along the path to try again.
To help her heal James decides to take her to stay on his family farm.
A city girl suddenly thrust into farm life she takes the opportunity to write a book about the history of the farm and generations of family who’ve lived there. Only James and his mother don’t want her writing about the past.
I hoped Matt the neighbour and Rusty the family dog would somehow be there to help her, or the librarian who helped Leila look for information on The Farm and later watched James guide Leila away from an event would come to discover the truth.
In the end only one person could help Leila see things clearly and that was Leila.
I struggled with Leila’s love for James, her constant ignorance of how he kept her at the farm, being guided and controlled without her realising it. At one point I really thought that James was ok and Leila was the problem.
Jessica goes into descriptive detail about the cocktail of drugs Leila is prescribed, the all consuming grief at the lost of a baby, the menstrual cycle and ovulation and the horror of control and the powerful need of another human to get what they what.
If this was a movie and honestly it would make an on the edge of your seat heart pumping movie, I would be hiding behind a cushion at the horror.
About:
An eerie psychological thriller, rippling with the Gothic undertones of Rebecca, from a startling new Australian talent. The Farm enthrals from the very first page.
The radio sputters out and the cows disappear . . . It is suddenly deeply quiet, with the bird calls and crunch of rolling tyres the only sounds. I twist slowly to look out the back window; the gate has long since disappeared.
When 37-year-old Leila suffers a health tragedy, she doesn’t recover as quickly as she expected. Her partner, James, suggests a year away from the city – they’ll stay on his family farm, where the wide, open spaces and clean country air will help her come to terms with her grief.
But the property is remote and the house oppressive. Leila is disturbed by strange noises, fleeting visions and intrusive dreams. James worries that her medication is causing hallucinations.
As Leila’s isolation grows amid the haunted landscape, so does her suspicion that she isn’t the first woman James has relocated to the farm. Is what she’s experiencing real? Or is it all in her head?
Compulsive and claustrophobic, The Farm is a Gothic ghost story ripe for book club discussion. It asks confronting questions about women’s bodies, what is expected of them, and who is really in control. And in Jessica Mansour-Nahra, Australia has a stunning and remarkable new talent.
