Farm Lit: Today’s New Hot Genre
Annie Taylor is living the life of her dreams. She’s a regular flight attendant on the New York/Rome route and has given notice to her three flight attendant roommates on their apartment. She’ll move in with her boyfriend after this flight.
As fate would have it, the obnoxious woman in first class has information Annie needed to know about Stuart and she realizes she can’t go through with her planned move. Then the rumors of a takeover of the airline she works for become reality. She finds herself without a job and without a home.
What choice does she have but return to Kentucky to visit her grandmother? Except they’d never been close. The link that had bound them together after Annie’s mother’s death was Annie’s grandfather, who’s now gone. Even a week or two butting heads with her opinionated grandmother may be too much, but Annie can see Beulah needs help. It becomes Annie’s job to try to convince her grandmother to sell the farm and move into town, but the old woman won’t budge.
Jake, the boy-next-door and Annie’s childhood playmate, keeps returning to Kentucky as he determines whether to stay in his successful banking career or grasp his dream of sustainable farming with gusto. His fiancee may have something to say about that, though.
While Annie waits for the take-over dust to settle in New York and to be rehired by the new airline, she takes over the garden and canning under Beulah’s tutelage. She finds her roots more tightly bound in Kentucky soil than she’d imagined. Will she return to the city and the skies, or stay grounded?
Grounded is a sweet story of homecoming and the value of simple living. It’s also a perfect example of farm lit from a Christian worldview. Farm lit is all about the life of modern-day “new” farmers. “These stories can be fiction or memoir, and most often include city-bred heroines who head for an idealized rural existence and (often) find the man of their dreams riding a tractor rather than a horse or a motorbike.” Grounded provides that with a slight twist in that Annie is returning to her farm roots.
Why is farm lit a growing genre? Today’s world is full of uncertainty. We have this feeling we’re careening along the brink of disaster and, strangely, we don’t like it. Many people are filled with longing to be connected, to be “grounded” as it were. To feel the soil between their fingers, to know where their food comes from, and to sink into a simpler lifestyle. If you can’t do it in person—though, in my opinion, you should try!—you can do it through immersion in a story like this one.
If you loved my debut novel Raspberries and Vinegar: A Farm Fresh Romance, you’ll love Grounded.
Angela Correll is a seventh generation Kentuckian who lives on a farm with her husband Jess and an assortment of cattle, horses, goats and chickens.
She has written over fifty columns for local newspapers about life, family, and farming. She is the co-owner of the Bluebird, a farm-to-table restaurant, promoting local food produced in a humane and natural way, as well as a shop, selling handcrafted goat milk soap.
Grounded is her first novel.
