| View Larger Image | Midwives (Oprah's Book Club) | Paperbackby Chris Bohjalian (Author)
| List Price: | $14.95 | | Price: | $10.17 | | You Save: | $4.78 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Edition: | 1st Vintage Contemporaries Edst Edition | | Page Count: | 374 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 08, 1998 | | Sales Rank: | 58,876th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780375706776
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
A talented midwife is arrested for murder when she saves a baby by performing a Caesarean section once she believes the mother has died--only to have her assistant insist later that the woman was still very much alive. Told in the mesmerizing voice of the midwife's daughter, Midwives depicts the aftermath of the tragedy. |
Amazon.com Review
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1998: On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated: Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house. In Midwives, Chris Bohjalian chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. It quickly becomes evident, however, that Sibyl is not the only one on trial--the prosecuting attorney and the state's medical community are all anxious to use this tragedy as ammunition against midwifery in general; this particular midwife, after all, an ex-hippie who still evokes the best of the flower-power generation, is something of an anachronism in 1981. Through it all, Sibyl, her husband, Rand, and their teenage daughter, Connie, attempt to keep their family intact, but the stress of the trial--and Sibyl's growing closeness to her lawyer--puts pressure on both marriage and family. Bohjalian takes readers through the intricacies of childbirth and the law, and by the end of Sibyl Danforth's trial, it's difficult to decide which was more harrowing--the tragic delivery or its legal aftermath. Narrated by a now adult Connie, Midwives moves back and forth in time, fitting vital pieces of information about what happened that night like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into its complicated plot. As Connie looks back on her mother's trial, she is still trying to understand what happened--not on the night of the disaster--but in the months and years that followed. --Margaret Prior |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 548 reviews)
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Fascinating and Perplexing by Jessica L. Weaver (Nashville, TN United States)  4 Stars
November 19, 2009
I've listened to this on the audio CD, and must first say that the narrator is really phenomenal!
Bohjalian spins a tale so detailed and real I was sure it was based on REAL notebooks of Sybil Dansforth. I could see all the characters and knew them by the end of the novel. As a previous reviewer said, it does remind one a little of Jodi Picoult, with the complex court case. Really enjoyed this novel and look forward to reading more from Bohjalian.
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Started out strong, but fizzled in the end. by J.L. Cocca (New Jersey)  2 Stars
November 19, 2009
When I read the cover description I was really excited to read this novel. I love a good moral dilemma in the books I read and, as a woman of child-bearing years whose an advocate of natural childbirth (if not homebirthing), I was very intrigued to see where the author would go with the premise. The idea that a midwife could accidentally kill a woman, presumed dead, by performing an emergency c-section and the ramifications when a coroner determines the c-section kills her is great fodder for a story.
However, what I found disappointing was the narration through the tale. It's told as a retrospective account by the midwife's daughter, several years after the events occurred. The narrator jumps from point to point, much like you'd expect an elderly woman to recount details of her life. It made for a very choppy read and as the pages wore on became very grating for me as the reader.
It got so bad that by the time I'd read halfway through, I'd lost interest in whether the midwife would be found guilty or innocent and only managed to finish because I'd already invested so much time. I felt it would be even more pointless to stop reading without seeing the ending. In hindsight, I should have made this one of the rare exceptions where I read the last chapter only and call it a day.
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Midwives by Tamara L. Wyman (Greendale, WI)  5 Stars
October 15, 2009
I read this book for a book club I am in and absolutely loved it. I loved the writers style and the content was very interesting. Good twist at the end. I highly recommend it.
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Excellent and quick service! by A. Vidal (Orlando, Florida) 5 Stars
October 08, 2009
I but this book as used (excellent conditions) and it really was, I also got it very fast!
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Great research, but more like an editorial than real story by Marika Stone (Austin, Texas)  3 Stars
September 11, 2009
I think Midwives is a long editorial in fictional form against well-meaning college degree-less lay midwives. The fictional techniques kick in when Bohjalian describes the night in question: Sibyl Danforth, lay midwife on an icy, rainy night in 1981 Vermont, tries to revive Charlotte Fugett Bedford, who appears to have died in labor. CPR fails, the phones are out and the roads are too icy for walking, so Sibyl cuts Charlotte open to save the baby. The husband complies by bringing a knife and the assistant lay midwife, Anne Austin, utters feeble protests. That is where the fact-gathering and fiction conflict for me. Why would the HUSBAND not object vociferously? It was handy that he was a cornpone "preacher" (quotes only because it's kind of an archaic term) and the assistant midwife was not "ept" at expressing herself.
I felt "grossed-out" by the graphic descriptions, (but I'm squeamish) and although it was clever to tell the story from Connie's 14-year-old point of view, though in her 30-year-old voice, I keep wondering how on earth Charlotte could have been alive with no pulse and no heartbeat. That's where the medical research would pay off for me. I am appalled to think of Sibyl cutting into a living woman. Why would a responsible midwife grab a knife and cut into someone, and even after she flinched, keep on cutting? It seems clear to me that she got "bossy," and decided she would save the baby no matter what. Once she'd made the first cut, she felt she had to keep going?
Chris Bohjalian is a talented novelist, but I imagine the seed for this book took root one morning in Vermont when he read in the paper about a woman in labor who'd lost her pulse, and with icy roads and downed phone lines, the lay midwife could not call for help. Perhaps he decided to get to the bottom of how that could happen. He did a ton of research, but I kept waiting for the forensic info about how a person could have no pulse, no heartbeat, and have eyes roll to the back of her head, not respond to CPR, and yet be alive? Is this how a coma works? Did any medical experts figure out why someone would appear to be dead but have no idea what caused that?
I empathized with the woman as she was about to die and her husband and their children, but didn't think Connie, the narrator, felt real. As Holden Caulfield says in Catcher in the Rye, you feel like phoning up a character who comes alive. Connie seemed like a composite character. I could believe someone like Sibyl could exist, but would not want to know her. That for me is the crucial ingredient--would I want to meet the characters? And that's another reason I suspect we were meant to empathize with the dead woman, while Connie and her mom feel like composites knit together to fulfill their fictional roles.
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