Review: The Call of the Farm

Fourth book of 2019: The Call of the Farm by Rochelle Bilow 🐮🐷📚

An unexpected year of getting dirty, home cooking and finding myself. This subtitle says it all. Not every story is about love and happy endings, sometimes they are about love, disappointment, heartbreak and finding yourself through by following your own path.

Let's be honest, it's a hard truth that most of us need to face and learn. We can't find happiness in others, we have to find out what makes us happy without the influence of anyone else. Once we find the freedom to be ourselves, we can share that with the world.

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Taking On A New Path

Rochelle Bilow, a classically trained cook and aspiring food writer, was nursing a broken heart and frustrated with her yet-to-take-off career when she set out to write a short profile of a small, sustainable CSA farm in central New York.

When she gets to the CSA she falls in love, the story is about a city girl falling for a farmer and joins in on the lifestyle. She feels out of place at the beginning, trying to find herself on the farm, she gets stronger and shares her experience of being an outsider. There's no easy living when it comes to farm life, she describes the challenges that comes along with it and the complicated relationships she develops along the way.

Finding Yourself Isn't Easy, But It's Worth It

Certainly an interesting and whimsical read. Even though she didn’t go into great detail about farming, as other books do, she wrote her memoir in another way. I appreciate the different perspective that her experience, and the experiences of others, offers - it brings to light hardships felt by many and how we all seek to find our life’s purpose through our work. We can sometimes assume our self worth is built through others, but we soon find out that is never the case. This story is a great tale of a woman finding herself in the midst of heartbreak, love, and hardwork.

I read some reviews about this book and I don't think most got the overall concept. To those who gave this book a weird review, they need to understand that life isn’t always pretty.

The lessons learned are:

- You can find joy in hard work

- Learn to love yourself instead of waiting for someone who can’t love you back

- Follow your passion even if that means changing your life completely.

So kudos to you @rochellebilow 🙌🏼

Crushed this book in one day on the plane ride home from Denver to Halifax. Thankful for a long flight letting me have time to enjoy yet another book.