Maw Books Blog

A 1996 Newbery Medal winner, The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman is set in a English village in the 1300’s. I got a sense of what this book would be about from the very first paragraph:

When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench. But the girl noticed and, on that frosty night, burrowed deep into the warm, rotting muck, heedless of the smell. In any event, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life - the food scraps scavenged from kitchen yards, the stables and sties she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body.

So there it is in the dung heap that we meet a girl named Brat, who is quickly renamed Beetle by the village boys. We also meet Jane, the village’s midwife who takes on Beetle as her apprentice, but carefully making sure that Beetle doesn’t learn too much so as to avoid competition. Beetle, who later renames herself again as Alyce is just glad to have a dry corner to sleep in and bread to eat. The story follows Alyce’s growing pains as she tries to find what she wants of the world, which happens to be, “A full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.”

The Midwife’s Apprentice wasn’t the best Newbery that I’ve read but I liked it well enough. I read it in one sitting and found interest in learning about midwifery during the medieval times which according to the author’s note at the end was a “combination of common sense, herbal knowledge, and superstition, passed from woman to woman through oral tradition and apprenticeship.”

I thought this random quote from The Midwife’s Apprentice was funny, so I leave you with that:

‘Touch that cat again,’ she shouted, ‘and I will unstop this bottle of rat’s blood and viper’s flesh and summon the Devil, who will change you into women, and henceforth each of you will giggle like a woman and wear dresses like a woman and give birth like a woman!’