The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is really a hard book from me to rate. I could have rated it SOOOOO much higher, which just a few changes in the story.
Right from the first page, the author brought me into the story. A group of young people must scribe the Book of the Unnamed Midwife, as they scribe we here the story. However about halfway through, we start reading things that are unknown…meaning they just switch POV to tell another persons story. I did enjoy the stories, but IF you are scribing a book, which is the premises of story…then we wouldn’t really know what happened to these people. At the end there was a collection of different stories, which is totally fine…but this should have been done with the “extra, in between” stories to, in order to make it flow correctly.
The story of a Plague that wipes out more then half the population, most women during childbirth, and how they have to overcome the hard life of having only a handful of women in the world was a truly wonderful tale. The book is mostly about one woman who pretends to be a man in order to survive. Having come from a medical back ground she tries to sell her medical expertise for food and other goods, avoiding people (men) at all cost. She tries to help a number of women who conceive during this change, only to lose the children, and sometimes the mothers.
It takes years before anyone is able to conceive a child that lives past a few days. The book being Scribed in honor of she, who remains unnamed.
Book Charmers 