What do You think about The Midwife's Tale (2015)?
Christian RomanceMartha Cade is a midwife in 1830 Pennsylvania. She is excellent at her job. However her world is about to spin out of control and the events will test her faith in herself, community, and her deep faith in God. After a delivery she receives word that her 17 year old daughter Victoria has run away with a theater troupe. Martha immediately goes in search of her daughter leaving her home and obligations behind. Martha will return home without her daughter to face the town she left 3 months earlier. She will find things have changed during her fruitless journey. Martha feels shame and deep anger over Victoria running off, guilt that she was not at home when Victoria left, anger that she had to always choose between her calling and her family, and fear that she will lose her profession. Her dream of Victoria taking over for her has been broken into pieces. The old doctor died and a new doctor arrived while she was gone. She fears the community will not welcome her back after the shame of Victoria running off and the new doctor will take her business. Mrs. Parr portrayed the methods of medicine in child birth in all its ineffective results from the medical establishment. Bleeding was a standard practice at that time and barbaric.Martha's faith is sorely tested. As with most of us, Martha is wallowing in self pity when things get tough. She waxes and wanes in her belief that God is in control, but always returns to God. As we all do in real life, she can be selfish, angry, and self-pitting. Christians are not perfect by any means. Ms. Parr does a wonderful job of portraying Christians as we are in all our faults and failures. But yet Martha continues believing in the good of God and his love through all her trials.Ms. Parr has created many facets to this story. As well as Martha's grief over her daughter, fear of losing her job, and fear of the communities reaction; we have a Boy Academy of street boys from New York open in the community, and their involvement with the citizens starts with a bang. Martha finds herself drawn to Willie, one the waifs, even through he has a knack for getting into mischief. This added a wonderful dimension to the story. There is a mystery involved in this story of thefts. When the guilty party is revealed, I was surprised. Ms. Parr did a good job of peaking your interest and keeping it high until the party was revealed. This added another dimension to the story. We find Martha has a romantic interest in Mr. Thomas Dillon that she has long refused to admit to herself.Underlying this story is the theme of God love, forgiveness, and grace. Ms. Parr plants these lessons without being preachy or pushy. This is a wonderful read and highly enjoyable.I highly recommend this book.I received this book from the publisher and from Netgalley in return for an honest review.
—Birdlady mallard
B- on AAR so 3.5 stars I think The Midwife's Tale might be the first Pennsylvania-set book I've read in ages that doesn't have an Amish person in sight. Instead, readers get to visit a sleepy 19th century country town and follow the adventures of the local midwife as she treats patients and starts to find a love story of her own.I'll start by saying that if you enjoy books such as Jan Karon's Mitford series, you may well like spending time in Trinity, Pennsylvania. The author fills this book with plenty of side stories about various secondary characters, and lots of local color. If the idea of gentle humor and plots that meander leisurely along makes you want to faint from boredom, this may not be your book. Fortunately, this reader found Trinity a primarily enjoyable place to visit.The title of the book is apt as the story truly does focus on the midwife, a fortysomething widow named Martha Cade. By all accounts, Martha seems to have loved her husband, but especially now that her two surviving children are grown, midwifery takes up the largest part of her life. Through Martha's eyes, we see a vision of 19th century life that is largely non-romanticized. Everyone, Martha included, works very hard just to keep food on the table and households running. As a widow with no resources other than the payments she receives from patients, Martha has had to live in a small room attached to her brother's tavern and even though we see how simple her life is, readers also spend enough time with Martha to see that she views her position as a calling and that she is largely satisfied with her lot in life.Practical, good humored Martha is a mostly enjoyable character. Her life is not without struggle, as her young adult daughter has recently run off with a travelling theater troupe, making Martha the subject of gossip tinged alternately with scandal and deep concern. Even though Martha appears respected in Trinity, she also faces a threat to her livelihood in the form of a young doctor who has set up shop in town. Like many doctors, Dr. McMillan finds Martha's way of doing things backward, but his push for modern medicine endangers Martha's practice.This is a partial review. You can find the complete text at All About Romance: http://likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookRev...
—Lynn Spencer
I didn’t realise when I selected this book to review, but it’s actually a reprint of A Place Called Trinity, published by St Martins Press in 2002 to mediocre Amazon reviews. I don’t know why Bethany House decided to publish a medicore reprint when there are a lot of better first-time novelists begging for a chance to be published through Bethany House or one of the other major CBA publishers. It doesn’t seem like it’s undergone any changes since the original version—the writing, frankly, isn’t up to the standard I expect from Bethany House, and I sincerely hope the NetGalley ebook wasn’t the final edited and proofread version (tattoo and tatoo in the same sentence? Please.)The beginning was slow, as it covered sixty years of medical history in the town of Trinity, and it never got faster. A lot of the story was told in the past rather than being shown in the present—Parr has midwife Martha Cade thinking about a conversation she’s just had rather than showing us the scene in which the conversation occurred. This felt old-fashioned and boring. Yes, I know the book is set in 1830, but it doesn’t need to feel as if it were written in 1830 as well. The most distracting thing in The Midwife's Tale was the dialogue tags. It seems plain old “said” is too difficult. Instead, the characters gushed, suggested, murmured, whispered, simply said, ventured, argued, offered, spat … and that’s just one conversation. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the tags fit the characters, but gushed sounds like a modern teenage girl—a cheerleader, perhaps—not a staid middle-aged housekeeper or a widowed midwife in 1830. Modern Christian writing has been criticised for obeying the "rules" to the point where individual voice is removed from the writing. This novel is a good argument for the rules.There were flashes of brilliance in the writing, like “a skein of good intentions that tangled her hopes with disappointment”. But these were outweighed by the ever-present explanatory dialogue tags and excessive telling, which made it hard to see the story. I know there are people who enjoy this kind of writing and storytelling, but I’m not one of them.Thanks to Bethany House and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review.
—Iola
