Imagine anything and everything that can go wrong when trying to midwife a birth: there are complications with an at-home pregnancy in rural Vermont; a storm rages; phones go out and roads are impossibly icy; the midwife's assistant is inexperienced and immature. The husband freezes, struck and stuck immobile with fear. These are the days before cell phones and computer communications. No VoIP, no texting, no Googling how to perform a cesarean or how to stop a woman with high blood pressure from having a cerebral hemorrhage. There is no way to go for help when this same exhausted woman starts bleeding to death after hours and hours of trying to give birth to a second child. A desperate situation calls for desperate measures and seasoned veteran midwife Sibyl Danforth makes a decision to perform an emergency cesarean on this mother. Months later, at her trial for manslaughter, she will tell the court she believed the mother had died. Was it a necessary action or did Sibyl commit callous unthinkable murder? As with all suspicious deaths, Sibyl must be tried in front of a jury of her peers, all the while battling traditional medical opinions and an overzealous community ripe for justice. The midwife culture is one of hippies, people who buck the system and thumb their noses at modern medicine. Midwives give off the vibe they lounge around buck naked while smoking pot. Told from the perspective of Sibyl's daughter, thirty year old Connie Danforth looks back on her mother's horrific choice and the subsequent trial that followed. ( )

Vermont, 1981. Sibyl Danforth is a well-established midwife. But when complications arise on a night when the weather prohibits getting her patient to a hospital, she's forced to make a decision. At the end of that long night, an infant is saved, but the mother is dead. The implications of this rock the state of Vermont and Sibyl's fate will be determined by a jury's decision.

I've read quite a lot of Chris Bohjalian, but this is what I'd consider his breakout novel (I'm assuming because it's an Oprah pick), and I've had it on my bookshelf for quite a long time, just now getting around to reading it. It's not my favorite of his, but it's certainly not my least favorite either. I suppose I was expecting a little more "wow" factor, given the hype it had at the time. (But again, that was probably the Oprah influence.) Definitely some controversial subjects here, not only the midwife vs. hospital birth, but also the decision made during the particular home birth in this story. It's a good discussion book, and overall a good book. The choice to use Sibyl's 14-year-old daughter as the narrator is somewhat of an odd one in my opinion. I'm not sure it added to the story, though I will say that Bohjalian does do a good job with female characters, not only in this book but in others as well. Overall, I'd recommend this one. ( )

I love everything I've read from Bohjalian, and Midwives lives up to my expectation.

The story centers around Sybil, a midwife who has lost a mother during a home birth gone wrong. The story is told primarily from the point of view of her teenaged daughter Connie.

Following the death of the lost mother, there is an autopsy and Sybil is arrested and tried. Most of the book follows the trial.

The thing I love about all of Bohjalian's books are the ambiguous moral dilemmas that leave me asking "what would I do?" and "what side would I have taken?" and "how would I have acted?"

Definitely a thought-provoking book! ( )

Excellent read. Very well researched but not overly technical. Chris Bohjalian does a remarkable job of writing from the perspective of a 14 year old girl, as well as inserting selections from her mother's diaries into each chapter. For a man to be able to grasp the female psyche and emotions during what would have been a terrifying and tension filled time in both of their lives is saying something about this author. ( )

Christine recommendation. ok. but too deep for me. ( )