The Birth House

very interesting read but upsetting at the same time

Great book

It is easy to see why this charming book has become a Canadian best-seller. It takes readers back to a time and place where life was simpler, though more elemental, and introduces a most attractive heroine in young Dora Rare, who becomes the midwife to her small community. The place -- a real one -- is Scots Bay, Nova Scotia, a small fishing and shipbuilding village at the tip of a rocky peninsula in the Bay of Fundy, isolated from the larger town of Canning by an intervening mountain. The time is roughly that of the First World War, and though the munitions explosion in Halifax and the Spanish Flu epidemic in Boston both play a part in the story, its focus is mainly on the women remaining in the village after the men have left.Among these is Dora, reputedly the only girl child ever born to a Rare man. As a girl, she strikes up a friendship with Marie Babineau, an old Acadian woman who subsists on the charity of the local women in return for her services as a herbalist, healer, and midwife, "catching" babies as they come into the world, or occasionally undoing their conception; her only aim is to help. Dora becomes her apprentice while still in her early teens, and eventually takes over, although she also keeps a foot in the more normal social life of the village. The contrast between old half-superstitious wisdom and modern science is one of the few plot tensions in the book, especially with the arrival of Dr. Gilbert Thomas, a practitioner of obstetrics and an early form of for-profit managed care. McKay tilts the playing-field, however, by making Thomas all too ready to bring out the chloroform, forceps, and scalpel, and showing him totally blind to the emotional needs of his patients. While she paints a valuable picture of the early feminist struggle for autonomy in women's health, it is hard not to read this as a polemic for her own day also.McKay, who lives in a former birth house herself, has done an impressive amount of research into social, medical, and maritime history, herbalism, and folklore. There is even a beautifully-illustrated herbiary at the end of the novel. Her book is a treasure-trove of tidbits of knowledge. The problem with this, however, is less her few inaccuracies (such as mentioning transistor radios three decades before their time) than the difficulty of maintaining narrative tension while writing essentially in scrapbook form, with vignettes, journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings intercutting the mainly first-person account. This is especially true at the end, where the novel settles down gracefully into a series of glimpses. Though similar in subject and setting, it has none of the wildness or tension of Michael Crummey's GALORE. It is not a book I shall want to keep on my own shelves, but I shall certainly send it to my pregnant daughter, in some confidence that she will like it.

I like the story...how it weaves and takes you along. Lovely book

I've read both Ami McKay's books and both are just amazing! She is just a wonderful writer and really brings you into the time peroid and lives of these characters. I love the fact that the underlying current in both books is women and their rights and women banding together and taking control of their bodies. In this one, it's about a woman's right to decide how and where she will have her baby. Not the doctors decision or her husbands. As well it's about women choosing when to have babies. So empowering. Dora Rare is an unwilling midwife to begin with and then finds her power and place in the village as a savour to the women there. Truely a great read for any woman.