The+Midwife's+Apprentice

=Village Life The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman=

(Copyright in 1995)

Book Review by Samara Goldbrener

= Summary:= = = Once Upon a time there was a girl with no family, no house, not even a name. She has been passed around from place to place stealing some food and shelter into the people chase her away. This is how her life has been up until one cold night she falls asleep in a dung heap in a barn in a village. She awakens to a woman with sharp features and a very unbecoming personality. The woman is Jane, the midwife and she needs an apprentice. Jane calls the girl Beetle because she reminds her of a dung beetle sleeping in dung. She offers Beetle the job of the midwife's apprentice for she sees that Beetle is smart because she takes warmth from the dung. Beetle spends her days doing little chores for Jane, the midwife. Sometimes the boys of the village tease Beetle because she is dirty and poor. One day the midwife was out and someone came to fetch her to deliver a baby. Since she wasn't there they took Beetle instead. Beetle didn't know much about delivering a baby but finally she delivered it. The next day she didn't come back so Beetle had to go to the market for her. At the market Beetle's eyes were opened to many amazing things she was unaware of. She decided to change her name to Alyce because she now felt important enough to go to the village, she was certainly important enough to have her own name. When she returned to town she was informed the Midwife was out delivering a baby at the manor. Someone came to fetch her and decided to use Alyce as a midwife. Alyce tried and failed. She felt so humiliated that she ran away. She ran to an inn. The inn keeper hired her and she worked there for around 6 months happily. A customer taught her how to read, she learned how to cook chicken and she learned how to clean animals. One day a man and woman came to the inn and the woman went into labor. No one knew what to do! Alyce successfully delivered the baby. After that Alyce went back to the village and became the Midwife's apprentice yet again in hopes to be the Midwife one day.

=review:= I personally did not enjoy this book. The moral of the story wasn't very touching and the writing style was very boring. If you are looking for a book on midwifes and people achieving things then you might enjoy this book. If I were to rate this novel on a 1-10 level, 10 being the best and 1 being the worst I would give it a 5.5. I wouldn't rate it higher because it is not interesting and there are no cliff hangers. Somethings I learned about the time period in my book is that the medical techniques used in that era didn't really have any scientific value, for example they would drink ale and rub frog juice on laboring woman with no proof that that would help at all. The most amazing thing I learned from this novel is that in the middle ages they could deliver a perfectly healthy baby even though they weren't sanitary and didn't supply shots or antibiotics. Nowadays in America most people would never hear of delivering a baby so unsafely.