The chapters consist of accounts of these births, each ending with a diary entry to validate the new child delivered into a troubled world, babies both white and black. Many of Patience’s mothers cannot pay for her services, but this is her calling now: helping babies into the world. Kelly expires suddenly, Patience is alone on the small farm she inherits, with no friends, few reserve supplies and Kelly’s midwife instruments.Įvents move swiftly as the Depression settles a mantle of suffering over the country. Sorrow is familiar to Patience, having also lost her first lover and infant baby to death. Kelly took the frightened woman into her home after Patience (really Elizabeth Snyder) fled Pennsylvania, where her union-activist husband was killed in a deadly conflict between police and mine workers. Newly arrived in Union County, Patience has been the beneficiary of her mentor’s generosity. The protagonist, midwife Patience Murphy, attests to that in the beginning of her tale: “Love, birth, death, my trilogy.” This novel reads like a memoir, filled with the tales of women giving birth during the depression in West Virginia, the poverty and squalor of lives in crisis, as mines collapse and families hunker together for survival. Book review: Patricia Harman's *The Midwife of Hope River*
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