This book tells the story of a modern day midwife who is on trial for involuntary manslaughter when a patient dies during labor. This is a home birth set in a rural area in a snowstorm, making contact with a hospital or emergency assistance impossible. The midwife performs an emergency Caesarean with a kitchen knife to save the baby after the mother dies. The story is told through the eyes of the midwife's 14 year old daughter, as the case goes through the trial, with flashbacks of the event and the lives of the characters involved unfold. Although i like the author very much, i didn't like the book at all. i have such a personal aversion to home births and midwifery in this day and age, and for all the reasons that come out in this story. Home births only work if nothing goes wrong in the birthing. And in this case, the author's bias is so strongly in favor of midwifery and home birthing that he tries everything to get the reader's sympathy. It just didn't work for me. It's like saying, you don't really need to wear your seatbelt if you just drive safely. And when one passenger is ejected through the windshield, you try to excuse your actions by pointing out how safely you were driving, and it wasnt your fault you came upon a patch of black ice.

I was surprised to find this book had been written by a man. It was written so sensitively and from the daughter’s perspective.
As a midwife it was also expertly accurate as I understand midwifery and obstetrics to be in the US. We have come a long way from those times and lots have changed. Practising midwifery in the UK is well regulated and we are able to be present at homebirths. Women have the right to birth where they want and choose if to have a professional in attendance.
The story is captivating and I would encourage anyone involved in childbirth (midwives, doctors and birthing women) to read it.

This was a gripping read and I loved Connie, the 14-year old narrator of this story. A compelling story and great characters. I'm glad I had the chance to read this novel which was written in 1997. If I hadn't have seen mention of it in a review of another Chris Bohjalian novel I would probably never have chosen to read it! Highly recommended.

Pshhhhew. Took me awhile to get through this---not because it was terrible, but because I have been darn busy.
This book was so good.
This midwife (Sibyl) is delivering a baby at home and there's an ice storm... Labor isn't progressing and there is no hope in getting to the hospital with the weather the way it is.
Then, the laboring mom dies. So Sybil decides to save the baby via cesarean section.
Except she doesn't have a license to practice medicine and her young, inexperienced midwife apprentice is pretty damn sure the laboring mother was still alive when Sybil performed a major surgery.
None of that is a spoiler. That's basically the backstory to a long, intense legal drama that culminates with a verdict that I will not share.
What a fantastic book this is. ❤ A must-read.

Though well written, clearly somewhat researched, and somewhat captivating, I am left with very little but anger at this book's indictment of home birth and midwifery. The author's insistence on representing midwifery as a peasant skirt, wool sock and sandal wearing community, the lack of delving into the care midwives give (often far superior to that of ob/gyns), and blatant disregard for the safety measures used by certified professional midwives (lay midwives, as he likes to call them) left me upset. The slap in the face betrayal of the daughter's adult profession further led to the indictment. There is very little attention paid to the realities of home birth.
What saddens me, especially, is that an average woman who might be considering home birth will come across this book in her research. This story is no where near the norm. In fact, in modern midwifery, this story would likely never happen.
Leaving Sybil robbed of her passionate work at the end was the very last straw.
This book, written by a man, lacks any real knowledge of both home birth and midwifery and appears, to me, to be hospital birth propaganda.

Across the landscape of his career, author Chris Bohjalian has written novels about a murderer’s plight against a privileged family in World War II Italy, about a young social worker driven into Jazz Age Long Island by a homeless man’s photographs, of an American woman’s love for an Armenian man in early-twentieth century Syria, and more. In his contemporary classic, Midwives, he tells the unforgettable story of midwife Sibyl Danforth and a home birth gone tragically wrong. Narrated by Sibyl’s fourteen year-old daughter Connie, Midwives is a chilling and evocative account of what one woman will endure for the sake of protecting her name and standing by her choices. When Sibyl Danforth experienced challenges in the delivery of a client’s child, she would have called the hospital and sent for an emergency rescue squad. But in a small Vermont town in the throes of a winter storm, help is an impossible distance away and Sibyl finds herself the only hope of a helpless, unborn child. After the mother has expired, Sibyl takes matters into her own hands and performs an emergency cesarean section to save the child. But what if, as the prosecutors of her court case are determined to prove, the mother had still be alive when Sibyl cut the baby from her?

With the sort of harsh but deeply emotive freedom that makes his work so singularly compelling, Bohjalian unravels the story of Sibyl’s journey to clear herself of being labeled a murderer. Is she suffering vulgar mistreatment at the hands of others, or did she truly make an atrocious mistake? There’s something quiet and vulnerable about Sibyl as a character, which makes her no less vivid, but where the novel really excels in its character depiction is in narrator Connie. In Connie we see a strong, determined young woman represented with the same clarity and depth as many of Bohjalian’s other memorable characters, whereas Sibyl sometimes seems to be hiding behind a smokescreen (a necessity, I think, if we readers are to form our own judgments of Sibyl’s story).

Much like The Double Bind, Midwives plays very steadily on Bohjalian’s knack for psychological mischief; through a fairly quiet and unhurried story he seems to know how to guide his reader into a false sense of security before sweeping revelations come in to knock us off our feet. Also as with The Double Bind, I’m left to wonder exactly how he manages to know what to put in and what to leave out. For me, Midwives worked really well from beginning to end; it had me riveted, yet never able to guess exactly how the ending would play out – and then thrown for a few final loops just when I thought I couldn’t be caught by surprise.

Additionally, the level of research that Bohjalian undertook to make Midwives such an engrossing novel is quite fascinating. Not only does he explore the details of midwifery in 1980s America with astonishing acuity, but the novel’s two acts documenting the subsequent manslaughter trial include some aggressively researched and impressive court room drama. This is an interesting novel in its many assets and its many areas of strength: once again the narrative carries off of the pages to envelope the reader in the setting, and young Connie – thirty at the time of her narrative, but fourteen in her memories – is as vividly imagined as the midwife at the center of the plot. Bohjlaian has proven himself as a masterful storyteller and as particularly adept at creating multi-faceted, deeply intellectual drama, but Midwives delves also into an element of the profoundly human, glimpsing the vulnerabilities of human nature and exploring the emotional ways in which we deal with those imperfections. At times challenging, often raw in its uninhibited exploration of truth, Midwives relays much heart and determination even amid the most devastating of tragedies.

(© Casee Marie, originally published on August 29, 2014 at LiteraryInklings.com.)

In this book we follow a US midwife who is at a home birth during a storm when all communication is cut off. The mother dies and the midwife performs a Caesarian section to save the baby. She is later charged with murder as there is some confusion as to whether the mother had actually died or was killed by the operation.

The book follows all of this through the eyes of the midwife's 14 yr old daughter. As such some of what we view is not necessarily a reliable account. The story then becomes essentially a court procedural. There is a great deal of discussion and debate over the ethics and training of midwives, and much description of doctors versus midwives over the safety of home birth and hospital/medical managed labour.

Bohjalian sweeps us up into the terrible events of that night immediately. Throughout the book we are lead to sympathise with all sides of the story - the widower, the medical advisers, the midwife's husband and of course her teenage daughter. This is a quick and easy read and it keeps you engrossed until the very end.

However, I have some reservations as to the content of the book and the way in which some of it is represented. Not being American and coming from a country with fully-trained midwives, I found much of the rhetoric to be almost irrelevant - train the midwives to the standards needed. Also the undertone of the text was such that anyone wanting a home birth was part of the 'brown rice and sandals brigade'! as if the statistics dont speak for themselves. As a novel, simply for a good readable book it is worth reading. For a balanced understanding of natural birth and midwife-led care this is not a clear representation.

Many thanks to Deb for a fun-read and for my Christmas in July present!

راستش خلاصه ای که خود کتاب برای ما توضیح داده کل ماجراست
تقابل بین مدرنیته و سنت
نهایتا ۲/۵ امتیاز خوبی واسش
یه کتاب سرگرم کننده سبک در عین حال یه بخشی از تقابل پزشکها و ماما ها و مردم با هم رو هم میبینیم

“Most of the time, labor is like going for a ride in the country. Nothing unusual will occur. But sometimes— Sometimes you’ll hit that patch of black ice and skid off the road, or a dump truck will lose control and skid into you.”
Suspenseful and thrilling to read. Real page turner and the writing is very vivid. Just kept reading and reading late into a snowy evening.

This was a book that I started several years ago and then lost interest. As it is a popular book, it remained on my TBR list, but somehow I just never found the motivation to pick it up again - at lest not until GR challenges came along for which it was an ideal choice.

This is the story of a young girl's family, particularly her mother and the singular event of her mother's life which helped to form hers.

Sibyl Danforth was a dedicated midwife who one horrible night had a mother to die giving birth. Sibyl saved the child by doing an emergency operation...and, there the story starts. What really happened? Was the patient really dead or did Sibyl's action kill her?

Connie is Sibyl's 14 year old daughter and the anrrator of the story and its events. The reader sees everything from Connie's re-telling and point of view, which is that of a young teen and not the adult that she later becomes.

I got thoroughly caught up in Connie's story of her mother and the trial and found that I believed the outsome of the trial was sure. But was it?

This is the first Chris Bohjalian book that I have read. Gave it 4* and will definitely look for another.

I have two opinions on this book.

First of all, it really does a great job of explaining why some women choose to have their babies at home, why it is safe, why we should have that choice. I feel passionately about my own homebirth experience. It is not, for the most part, dangerous or an unwise decision. For most people. I don't think most pregnant women are sick and therefore do not need hospitals. So many women have been trained by OBs to think things like: "My body doesn't go into labor on it's own" or other things like that. "Midwives" also is very good at portraying the often hostile relationship between the, and I put as much sarcasm as I can in this, "medical" community versus the midwives.

The outcome of the book surprised me. I can't write why without giving away the ending. How I wish for a book group to discuss these things with!

Several days after completing the book, I'm still somewhat conflicted. I will say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I'd anticipated (Oprah's Book Club picks don't usually interest me; this was a book group selection). I think the suspense was good—I was still trying to guess what the verdict would be up until the very end. But I think that part of the reason why I couldn't figure out what the verdict would be was that in cases like these, regardless of what the verdict was, everyone's lives are changed dramatically, and never for the better. It doesn't matter what the verdict is; everyone loses either way. (It reminded me of the Jodi Picoult books I've read in that way.)

I enjoyed the narrator's voice for the most part, but I found the way Bohjalian skipped around in the chronology to be irritating on some level, and some of the foreshadowing (Connie is "writing" this story from the perspective of a 30-year-old woman, 15 years after the trial) was distracting and kind of heavy-handed.

And I very seldom understand why it is that authors feel the need to throw in extra-martial flirtations or affairs all over the place—there's not enough drama in a manslaughter charge that we need to add "oh, and the defense lawyer is in love with his defendant," even if it never actually gets off the ground. Also, from reading previous reviews, many of which mentioned how Charlotte had kept her medical history from Sibyl, I had expected some HUGE REVEAL about a major medical problem. Nothing of the sort. A little disappointed in that.

SPOILERS:

One thing I wondered was why it is they never tried the phones again. According to the book, the phones were down for 4 hours, between midnight and 4 AM. Charlotte didn't die until 6:30. I realize that the roads were basically impassable and EMTs probably couldn't have gotten there to help, but at least having a doctor available for consult after pushing for 3+ hours couldn't have hurt, right? Hewitt could have told Sibyl about "vagaling" or talked her through what to do when the baby wasn't coming, if nothing else. I also didn't appreciate how the prosecutor would go on about how cruel Sibyl was to "force" Charlotte to push for so long—when getting to the hospital for a C-section isn't possible, it's not the cruel midwife forcing you to push; you keep needing to push until that baby's out or you die trying. Period. Biological urge is not forced on you by the midwife.

Upon reading the final diary entry, my first reaction was nausea; after thinking about it for a few minutes though, I realized that it was written after Sibyl had already been accused (though not arrested) and spoken with the lawyers for the first time, and therefore, I would anticipate her questioning and second-guessing herself at that moment—and for the many months that followed. In the moment, I think I would still have done what she did and worked under the assumptions she'd had. She—and everyone else in the room—thought Charlotte was dead at the start, and no one ever said anything differently until hours after it was all over. I think it's really sad that we live in a world where many people can't accept that sometimes tragedy happens, and it really isn't anyone's fault, and there's really not anyone to blame.

END SPOILER

Ultimately, I am no more or less a proponent of home birth than I was before. It's totally not for me, and I do think that midwifery should be regulated on some level. But really, it seems that what happened here was a huge set of unfortunate, unforeseeable circumstances that could have happened to any pregnant woman (whether she'd intended on having a home birth or not), and at least they had a midwife there to see them through it and there to save the baby when everything really hit the fan. I don't know what message Bohjalian was trying to convey—he didn't seem to have any real agenda in writing this, so I don't know why he did—but that's what I took from it.

I could probably nit-pick a lot of things in the writing that I think could have been written better—unnecessary drama or mystery that seemed to piddle out—but it was a compelling read. I had a hard time putting it down. But I'm not interested in picking up any of his other books, and I still feel kind of depressed after having read it, three days later. So, 2.75 stars.