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novelvisits's review
3.0
Just okay for me. I think I'd have liked to know more about her childhood/young adult years and less about forest management! Full review to follow.
jessdekkerreads's review
reflective
slow-paced
Another much anticipated memoir of this year for me, one about motherhood and memory, and returning home. This is very much a pandemic memoir, and unfortunately I found myself skimming this one quite a bit. It felt very repetitive. I appreciated McPhee’s recounting of returning home to care for her mother who was suffering from dementia; how her mother’s loss of memory affected her; the memories that then returned to McPhee after returning home; and how the pandemic affected her family - McPhee turning to nature to heal. But, when I found myself dozing or skimming, I knew it wasn’t the memoir for me. Again, another memoir that has a higher average rating on Goodreads, so take my mini review w/ a grain of salt.
*thank you to Scribner for providing me with a final copy - this one is out now!
lonestarwords's review
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Endings don't always come with the precision of a guillotine, especially an ending like this one, involving a pandemic that wasn't ending neatly, a mother whose dying was steady if slow, a deep love of a place tethered to ghosts and the past.
Omega Farm
Martha McPhee
•
The last few weeks brought me two books that took me back to Vermont. North Woods took me back to our early American home restoration and Omega Farm back to our farm.
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Omega Farm is a memoir about place - how we become tethered and the way it pulls at us for the rest of our lives. McPhee tells us the story of waiting out the pandemic at her family farm in NJ, as her mother descended into dementia. The author moved with her husband and two teenagers from NYC to the place she'd called home as a child and, along with remote learning, remote working and full time caregiving, she confronts the ghosts from her past. The book is a sort of reckoning with her unconventional childhood and it's beautifully told against what life looked like for everyone in the spring of 2020.
•
The sheer number of similarities between McPhee's account of life on her farm and our experiences had me so invested. From dealing with forestry management when your land is in a land trust, to raising chickens with the peril of foxes, to a cottage with rotating tenants. There is even a monstrous septic disaster in her story that almost mirrors ours but for us it was the final straw in farm living. This was like reading a chapter out of my own life.
•
At its core, Omega Farm is a daughter's love story to her mother. McPhee shares the pain of watching her mother waste away while lovingly caregiving day in and day out. At the same time McPhee wrestles with her own personal demons and finds caring for the land to be a balm to her soul. I connected so deeply with her passages about how overwhelming a farm of this size is, and yet our most meaningful family memories are tied to that place.
•
I would have loved this memoir had it not mirrored my own life on "the farm" because it's just a beautiful and heartfelt, but I nodded in affirmation over and over again.
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Thank you Scribner books for this copy. Out 9/12
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