A Novel of an American Midwife
Book Blurb:
Midwife Patience Murphy has a gift: a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience takes the jobs that no one else wants, helping those most in need – and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust – but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate and fragile for her to ever let anyone in.
Honest, moving, and beautifully detailed, Patricia Harman’s The Midwife of Hope River rings with authenticity as Patience faces nearly insurmountable difficulties. From the dangerous mines of West Virginia to the terrifying attentions of the Ku Klux Klan, Patience must strive to bring new light and life into an otherwise hard world.
My Review:
Stories set in the early thirties are usually full of grit, hardship, and economic misery. Using the Depression as an atmospheric cloak, this novel explores women and their families’ struggle with the impending birth of a baby.
Patience Murphy may be fairly new to the world of midwifery, but she doesn’t lack compassion nor steadfast courage. Particularly in the south and the conditions of the Appalachian residents during that dark time, it’s a practice that brings both joy and distress, adding yet another burden to an already over-burdened home.
And many of the conditions are desperate, from starvation to the inability to confront catastrophic winters.
I appreciated the hardening of Patience as she tests her skills throughout the storyline, sometimes partnering with the local veterinarian in the care of animals whose owners cannot pay for services except perhaps for the offer of a live chicken in exchange.
Patience is in a community in which she’s virtually a stranger, having fled her previous home under suspicious circumstances. The time is rife with discrimination, raw relations, and the struggle against those who would take the worst job away from your own opportunity for employment.
I enjoyed the many births, the unique circumstances, and the backgrounds of the varied women, and also appreciated the inner knowledge Bitsy could convey. I tired, however, of some soap box discussions, perhaps an attempt to juxtapose that time with the same one we are currently experiencing. Also, I found her background pushing disbelief and thought it was not the first time I felt a separation from the main character.
The book is well paced and kept my attention, but I felt there were a few incongruous issues. I downloaded a copy of this audiobook from my local well-stocked library. These are my honest thoughts.
Rosepoint Publishing: Four Stars 
Book Details:
Genre: Medical Fiction, Family Life Fiction
Publisher: HarperAudio
ASIN: B01GIAIPNE
Listening Length: 12 hrs 4 mins
Narrator: Anne Wittman
Publication Date: June 3, 2016
Source: Local Library (Audiobook Selections)
Title Links: Amazon-US – Amazon-UK
The Author: Patricia Harman has spent over thirty years caring for women as a midwife, first as a lay-midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on communal farms in West Virginia, and later as a nurse-midwife in teaching hospitals and in a community hospital birthing center.
She spent over a decade in the sixties and seventies in her wild youth living in rural communes in Washington (Tolstoy Farm), Connecticut (The Committee for Non-Violent Action) and Minnesota (Free Folk). During the Vietnam years, she and her husband, Tom Harman, traveled the country, often hitch-hiking, as they looked for a place to settle. In 1974 they purchased a farm with a group of like-minded friends on top of a ridge in Roane County, West Virginia. Here on the commune, they built log houses, dug a pond, grew and preserved their own food and started the Growing Tree Natural Foods Cooperative.
It was during this time that Patsy attended her first home birth, more or less by accident. “Some people are destined,” she has written. “I was staying at a woman friend’s commune when she went into labor and I ended up delivering my first baby.” Soon after, Harman traveled to Austin, Texas to train with a collective of home-birth midwives. When she returned, she became one of the founding members of The West Virginia Cooperative of Midwives. Her passion for caring for women and babies led her to become an RN as the first step in getting licensed as certified nurse midwife. In 1985, with her children, a yowling cat and her husband she traveled north, pulling a broken down trailer to begin her training at the University of Minnesota where she received her MSN in Nurse-Midwifery.
Patricia Harman still lives and works with her husband, Ob/Gyn Thomas Harman, in West Virginia.. Though she no longer attends births, she provides care for women in early pregnancy and through-out the life span. She brings to this work the same dedication and compassion she brought to obstetrics.
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