The Birth House

Dora Rare is the first daughter to be born in generations of Rare men. Her birth brings up feeling of mysticism which only increases as she's taken under the apprenticeship of the towns Acadian midwife, Miss B. We follow her family through war, marriage, marital rape, death, historical tragedies, and renewing love as we watch her just live her life taking each day as it comes. We follow the harsh reality of being up in the isolated village from idle gossip to lack of work to horribly abusive men with no one to stop them. Yet Dora has a gift at healing, and does her best to do well by the women of the town. A Dr. comes to the town down the market, working with the men to sell them insurance for their wives births. His cruel methods show a juxtaposition against the suffragettes that some aspects of the modern world now invade the last place women actually had control of, the birth. It's truly a book of empowerment to women in all their places as we root for our heroine to decide her own fate.

The writing is fascinating piece where it feels almost flat, but in a way that truly benefits the story instead of taking away it. It's as if the fact that each women must go one step in front of the other is there the whole way through. Please don't mistake this flattness for a lack of capitvation. I spent many a night reading late.

Be warned it shines a light without fear to some very dark places of the early 1900s, but does so gracefully without spectical.