The Midwife's Revolt by Jodi Daynard

I read this one for my book club. I probably would not have picked it up otherwise, because I hadn't heard any reviews of it or recommendations, but I was game to try it. It seemed like an engrossing story: Lizzie Boylston is widowed in one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, and has to use her training as a midwife to survive and live on her farm. She lives in Braintree, Massachusetts, and one of her closest friends is Abigail Adams. Eventually events of the War come close to their small hamlet and the women all get involved.

There were some really good things about this book, and then some things I really was annoyed by. First, the good: I liked the detailed research that the author did in getting the setting right. I thought the details were impeccable and I got a good sense of the time period. I also really liked many of the characters and their interactions. I loved the sense of Abigail Adams that we got, since she seemed true to life after what I remember from reading John Adams (which I kind of want to read again, since I just listened to the abridged audiobook version years and years ago). I also liked the details of the birth stories that Daynard included, and the details of midwifery and the knowledge that Lizzie had in her work. I usually am not a huge fan of that sort of story (birth stories always freak me out) but none of them were depressing and that was one of my favorite parts of the book.

But the bad almost overwhelmed the good for me in this book. First of all, this book was soooooooooo long. It was over 400 pages and really did not need to be. The first half of the book had almost no action, it just had Lizzie and her servant Martha living on a farm, and it really did not need to be so detailed and so long. You could have easily cut out 100 pages and nobody would have noticed. I was super super annoyed by some of the major plot points: like Lizzie hints early on in the book that she dresses as a man and does some crucial work for the Cause, but she decides all on her own to crossdress and go try to spy on this one inn, without anyone asking her, and she pretty much gets nowhere as far as I can tell and is just stupid and not actually useful. I was so confused as to why she was doing that and what she accomplished, and how obviously stupid she was. She talked so much about how important her work was as a midwife and how she needed to be there to take care of the women in the area, but then she just up and leaves for weeks at a time because her work as a spy (???) was more important. It seemed like a MAJOR plot hole to me. And there were others. Her relationship with the two love interests (ugh) was also totally not believable or interesting at all. I couldn't see any reason why she would be in love with the one she really loved by the end. But the real killer for me was that the writing was awkward. I hate it when I read conversations between characters and I am distracted by how awkward the writing is--and that is exactly what was happening in this book. I hate making that general critique without any specific example or idea of how it could have been fixed (because I imagine it is very difficult to write good conversations), but it bothered me so bad. I couldn't get into the story because it was so annoying.

Overall, I'm not sure that this book fell into my goal of "reading books that make me happy," but I read it so that I could go to book club and doing that makes me happy, so I guess it works.