The Growing Season is Sarah Frey’s true story of how she overcame a challenging childhood to become America’s leading supplier of pumpkins. Similar to Tara Westover’s Educated, her childhood was chaotic with parents who were not in full control of themselves, let alone Sarah and her twenty siblings. Unlike Educated, The Growing Season spends more time exploring Sarah’s path forward, rather than rubbernecking at the lurid (and for Tara, sometimes gruesome) details of childhood.
As the youngest child in a large family, Sarah becomes the unlikely CEO of a large farm business, with four of her brothers forming a close-knit and formidable team. When they lack the $25,000 needed to buy a tractor to haul in the pumpkin crop, Sarah buys a $5,000 used school bus and cuts out the seats and windows, creating a huge harvesting vehicle. Creativity and an endless capacity for hard work are Sarah’s secret weapons.
The book has great advice for young people and anyone raising them. I especially like this passage towards the end of the book about Sarah’s son, William, and why he is having trouble getting along with a strong but pleasant classmate:
“So I finally sat William down and said, “What’s your issue with Savanna? Be honest.”
He leaned over the kitchen island and looked me right in the eyes. He said, “Well, Mom, she steals my thunder.”
I was glad that he saw that the problem was not with her but with his ability to accept the way she was. I also thought, I’ve probably stolen a lot of thunder in my life.
Stealing thunder is something girls need to do more often. And boys to learn to accept it, and to help them.
I recommend this story to young women (high-school age or older) with one caveat. The early chapters describe Sarah’s repeated sexual assault by a farmhand. When Sarah finally gathers the courage to report it to her parents, they do nothing about it. Only when Sarah shows them the peephole that he cut to view her from an adjoining room, do they fire him. Our young women (and men) need to know that such behavior — both the attacker and the lack of adult support and intervention — is reprehensible and unacceptable.