With a protagonist that is an ever understanding, compassionate, holds-to-her guns midwife and the villain a heartless, thoughtless, passionless.MAN, the story was too black and white to be good.
With that being said, it was impossible for this book not to annoy me. Writing that glorifies one means over another annoys me. But, the variety in which we can, and choose, to do it is wide and, thankfully, available. Birthing a child is exciting and scary and hard and wonderful and one of the most memorable things any woman will do in her lifetime. I'm not anti- home birth, but the more I read about the "exquisite, spiritual, satisfying" birthing of their babies, the more turned off I am by the usually-not-said-but-rather-implied understanding that any other kind of birth is not. I should have known better than to read this. Hauntingly written and alive with historical detail, ‘The Birth House’ is an unforgettable, page-turning debut. Death and deception, accusations and exile follow, as Dora and her friends fight to protect each other and the women’s wisdom of their community. But their traditions and methods are threatened when a doctor comes to town with promises of painless childbirth and sets about undermining Dora’s credibility. Dora becomes her apprentice at the outset of World War I, and together they help women through difficult births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling marriages. As a child in the small village of Scot's Bay, Dora Rare – the first female in five generations of Rares – is befriended by Miss Babineau, an elderly midwife with a kitchen filled with folk remedies and a talent for telling tales. Epic and enchanting, ‘The Birth House’ is a gripping saga about a midwife's struggles in the wilds of Nova Scotia. In a tale spanning the 20th century, Ami McKay takes a primitive and superstitious rural community in Nova Scotia and creates a rich tableau of characters to tell the story of childbirth from its most secretive early practices to modern maternity as we know it.
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