This was a bookclub pick that I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, but I did end up liking well enough. It didn't knock my socks off, certainly, but it was a nice book about small-town life in Nova Scotia during WWI. Our heroine is the only girl in a family of many many boys, who apprentices with the local midwife, a Cajun faith healer with Acadian roots and absolutely the most fun character in the book. There's a lot of great daily life details, and church and sewing circle political battles. When the book is focusing on the small town of a century past aspect, its strongest, and some of the language is very beautiful. It's the author's home town, and you can see how much she wants us to love the place as much as she does.

Sadly, it doesn't quite work on a couple other aspects. The author cites A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 in her notes, but seems to have missed a lot of the point of that book: midwives were mostly ordinary women with a trade they practised on top of their regular lives as part of a community. This is the full magical moon woo take on the topic. It was written in 2006, and reminded me of The Red Tent in its bull-headed insistence on reclaiming women of the past as magical and beautiful and perfect, and nuance and reality can take a hike.

Our Heroine never has a single opinion that would be out of place today. She's from WWI-era rural Nova Scotia, and while I can see her training leading to her being down with abortions and birth control, I feel like not even blinking when running into: lesbians, sex workers, suffragists, Black people, free-love communes, etc, was a bit too much of a stretch for me. The antagonist is the local doctor, who wants to start an obstetrics hospital to serve the region, and is wrong about everything. I will grant that 1915 was maybe not the best period in the history of ob/gyn research, twilight sleep being the hot new thing, and certainly male medical professions of the period (or any period) weren't known for listening to women. However, I am of the opinion that modern, science based medicine is a net positive, and having the dichotomy be: Women doing home birth always good v. medicine and hospitals always bad was... a bit much.

(The author of A Sweet Sting of Salt owes Ami McKay money, because that book is just this book plus lesbian selkies.)

And for all the period detail and love of place, it did feel like McKay was including historical events because she had to, rather than examining the impact they might have had at the time. We get both the Halifax Explosion and the Influenza pandemic, which were all-consuming horrors of the era, and the characters just sail through them, and then never really look back or seem impacted by that time everyone died. She does a bit better with WWI, and how having most of the young men gone changes the town, and worrying about the safety of friends and brothers, but on the whole I wanted more depth.

I've heard the author's other books are more or less the same idea, so probably won't look into any of her other novels, though her memoir looks interesting.

Should reread the Martha Ballard book. (I just learned, and am appalled to know, that there's a mystery novel with Martha Ballard as the main character where she uses her medical knowledge to solve crime, and this is a bestseller in the US, and probably the main way most people have encountered her. *wanders off to cry*)