REVIEW: The Midwife's Apprentice
Dec. 24th, 2024 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllSorry, it's been about a month and a half since I last posted. Truthfully, I haven't read many books that I'd be likely to post about over the period (I decided not to post a rant about how much I disliked 'Gladys or Gwenyth' by E. Everett-Green!) In fact, I haven't read all that many books over that time, but it's the Christmas holidays at last, so that should change.
The Midwife’s Apprentice: Karen Cushman, Macmillan 1997
This book is shorter and far less lively than ‘Catherine, Called Birdy’ and both feels aimed at a younger readership, but is also about midwifery, even if it doesn’t go into graphic detail. I think I would have been squeamish about it as an adolescent or young teen. Like Cushman’s earlier book, it’s set in medieval England, but its heroine is from a lower class.
The first chapter opens the book memorably, with an orphaned girl going by the name of Brat seeking heat and finding it in a dung heap. A woman, ‘neither old nor young but in between’ finds her, dubs her Beetle (for Dung Beetle). She is Jane Sharp and she offers the young, cold and hungry girl a roof and food if she will help her out, and so our heroine becomes the midwife’s apprentice.
She befriends a cat, chooses a name for herself (Alyce), while the cat chooses its own name (Purr). Later, she will help a younger boy, who may or may not be related to her, to find a name of his own. The story is about Alyce coming into her own, gaining skills and experience, almost despite the midwife who is jealous of her position, learning what emotions are and how to regulate them, and ultimately deciding who and what she is and what she wants to be – inasmuch as a girl could in medieval England. Her world is small, the village where she assists the midwife, the nearby manor and an inn she runs away to briefly. There she meets an educated man who recognises her curiosity, teaches her to read and talks about the wider world as it was known then. There is also a boy who Alyce impresses, and just the hint of a romance, although the focus is on self-realisation.
The details of childbirth – herbs and superstitions – are enough to make you shudder, especially given that Alyce’s reliance on her own spit to ‘clean’ things. This book will certainly make you appreciate clean, running and warm water. One woman and her husband didn’t even know she was pregnant until she started going into labour, when Alyce’s common sense and compassion help! Cushman’s research into the practices of the time seems sound (although for all I knew, she made them up) and it’s a refreshing way in to learn about the Middle Ages. Although it’s unlikely that all that happened to Alyce would have happened to an orphan in an English village at the time, it’s not impossible.
The writing is deceptively straightforward, bringing out universal truths for readers who hopefully know little of sleeping on the floor, of only having the one dress and rarely having a full stomach, but it’s something of a curio, being so slight, and yet the age of the readership being hard to pinpoint.
The Midwife’s Apprentice: Karen Cushman, Macmillan 1997
This book is shorter and far less lively than ‘Catherine, Called Birdy’ and both feels aimed at a younger readership, but is also about midwifery, even if it doesn’t go into graphic detail. I think I would have been squeamish about it as an adolescent or young teen. Like Cushman’s earlier book, it’s set in medieval England, but its heroine is from a lower class.
The first chapter opens the book memorably, with an orphaned girl going by the name of Brat seeking heat and finding it in a dung heap. A woman, ‘neither old nor young but in between’ finds her, dubs her Beetle (for Dung Beetle). She is Jane Sharp and she offers the young, cold and hungry girl a roof and food if she will help her out, and so our heroine becomes the midwife’s apprentice.
She befriends a cat, chooses a name for herself (Alyce), while the cat chooses its own name (Purr). Later, she will help a younger boy, who may or may not be related to her, to find a name of his own. The story is about Alyce coming into her own, gaining skills and experience, almost despite the midwife who is jealous of her position, learning what emotions are and how to regulate them, and ultimately deciding who and what she is and what she wants to be – inasmuch as a girl could in medieval England. Her world is small, the village where she assists the midwife, the nearby manor and an inn she runs away to briefly. There she meets an educated man who recognises her curiosity, teaches her to read and talks about the wider world as it was known then. There is also a boy who Alyce impresses, and just the hint of a romance, although the focus is on self-realisation.
The details of childbirth – herbs and superstitions – are enough to make you shudder, especially given that Alyce’s reliance on her own spit to ‘clean’ things. This book will certainly make you appreciate clean, running and warm water. One woman and her husband didn’t even know she was pregnant until she started going into labour, when Alyce’s common sense and compassion help! Cushman’s research into the practices of the time seems sound (although for all I knew, she made them up) and it’s a refreshing way in to learn about the Middle Ages. Although it’s unlikely that all that happened to Alyce would have happened to an orphan in an English village at the time, it’s not impossible.
The writing is deceptively straightforward, bringing out universal truths for readers who hopefully know little of sleeping on the floor, of only having the one dress and rarely having a full stomach, but it’s something of a curio, being so slight, and yet the age of the readership being hard to pinpoint.
