The Midwife of Hope River by Patricia Harman

Reviewed by Kristin

Patience Murphy has a difficult but very important job in Depression era West Virginia:  delivering babies.  She often takes care of the deliveries that the doctor won’t bother with, and those that are least likely to pay.  The book opens with a crying woman that Patience has just had to tell that her baby is dead.  With limited instruments and limited training, Patience is often the only person these coal mining families can go to for help.  Being called out in the middle of the night is not uncommon, and sometimes the families simply have nothing to give her for payment.  (Happily accepted payments might be a ham, a side of bacon, or a promise of a cord of wood for the winter.)

Patience is soon persuaded to take on Bitsy, a young African American girl, as a helper.  With Bitsy, Patience’s practice expands as more of the African American community is willing to call the midwife for assistance.  Bitsy becomes a true companion to Patience, in a time when social mixing of the races was much less accepted.

As the book progresses, Patience’s past is revealed.  Growing up in an orphanage, a lost love, and great heartbreak have brought her to the gentle mountains where she helps women and their babies.  Of course a little touch of romance is thrown in, as she meets veterinarian Daniel Hester.

I was interested in the book as it was set in an Appalachian mining town in the 1930’s, and one branch of my family lived in a Kentucky coal mining town in that time period and beyond.  Whenever I read stories of the difficulty of life in that kind of community, I connect with them as I think that my great-grandparents must have been very familiar with those hardships.  Even though life was hard, my grandma told me this about the Depression in a coal mining town:  “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor--because everyone we knew lived the same way.”  Even so, knowing that my great-grandparents lost babies to malnutrition or a failure to thrive, reading this type of story gives me a fuller understanding of the life conditions people endured not so long ago.

I found this to be a hopeful book, with characters looking for the small joys of life in a time when life was not easy.  Patience is a unique character who is willing to go out of her way, even to put herself at risk, for others.

Nevermore: Obituary Writer, Midwife of Hope River, and My Own Country

Two fiction books and a non-fictional account about this area dominated a recent meeting of Nevermore.

The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood intertwines the lives of two women separated by place and time.  In 1919, Vivien is still searching for the love of her life, an already married man who disappeared years earlier in the San Francisco earthquake.  She now writes obituaries to help others cope with their own losses as she continues to grieve her own.  The second part of the story is set in 1963, where wife and mother Claire is fascinated by Jackie Kennedy, who seems so glamorous.  Claire is restless, feeling that she wants more from life—and from her marriage to a man she’s no longer sure she loves.  Our reviewer was quite taken with this book and with the way the lives of the two women converge.  She highly recommends this book, and compares it to The Postmistress by Sarah Blake.

The Midwife of Hope River is set in Depression-era West Virginia, where Patience Murphy works as a midwife, delivering babies for poor families no matter their race or ethnicity.  Patience is hiding secrets of her own, however, and is afraid that her past may catch up with her sooner rather than later. Author Patricia Harmon, a midwife herself, has written a riveting and uplifting book that employs the social conditions and mores of the time to good effect:  striking miners, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, etc.  While the details are authentic, Harmon doesn’t resort to writing in dialect to give the flavor of the place. This novel has been read by several Nevermore members, earning praise all around. Fans of Call the Midwife (both memoir by Jennifer Worth and the PBS series based on the book) might enjoy this one, which has many of the same themes in a different setting.

A modern, non-fictional book about medicine in Appalachia also caught the attention of a Nevermore reader. My Own Country:  A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese tells of his experiences as a doctor in Johnson City, Tennessee when a strange disease begins showing up: a peculiar and frightening auto-immune disease that will become known as AIDS.  Verghese writes beautifully, with a discerning eye and compassion toward both his patients and toward his new home in Appalachia, which carries a bit of culture shock.  This is another book that has received near universal praise and recommendation for its insights and sensitivity. My Own Country first came out some years ago, but the library continues to have to buy replacement copies due to the book’s popularity. Verghese has continued to write, most recently producing an acclaimed novel entitled Cutting for Stone.