Rating: 
Summary: True Secrets
Review: I eagerly awaited this novel, which was written, by one of my favorite young cousins (to be up front), and I was not disappointed. It is beautifully written and tells a good story. Moreover, having grown up in West Virginia not far from the novel's setting, the detail rings true, especially the angst of the young midwife when she learns the secret of the red book. The author has heard all the old stories of the hollows, done her research, and crafted an encompassing tale. I belong to a terrific book club and read very widely. I'm not one to cry over a book, but I did on reading this one.
Rating: 
Summary: The Midwife's Tale
Review: I found the story very touching and the characters unusually real. I felt so close to them that I wanted only good things to happen to them. They seemed like good friends or family.
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Debut
Review: I loved every word of THE MIDWIFE'S TALE because each word was carefully chosen because the author seemed to care about this story and about these characters, which become real flesh-and-bone people by the end of the book. I loved them all (but especially Lauren) and will carry these people with me a long time. This is a quietly lovely book, one of those that doesn't holler out for praises but is instead subtle and careful and luminous. It has a haunting quality about it that I haven't taken away from a book in ages. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written story of hope and accomplishment
Review: I read such mixed reviews of this novel that I finally had to see for myself. What a treat! Laskas has taken the theme of West VA midwifery in pre-war Appalachia and created around it the story of one woman's life. In truth, she's pulled me so forcefully into the heart and mind of Elizabeth that I stayed up until 3am to learn her fate. Well worth the loss of sleep, I assure you.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: I really enjoyed this book. As another reader said, it crept up on me and I find I'm still living with the characters even now I've finished the book. I'll take the author's word for it that women actually birthed in their beds because, in my experience, any woman who gets the chance to control her birth is more likely to stand up, walk around, crouch and so on. But I loved the intimacy between the midwives and the women - a world where men have no place. And the references to herbs - which many wise women still use today. I enjoyed the language - usually attempts to write in a local style grate on me but this didn't.... it felt very natural and real.
Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous
Review: I was enthralled with THE MIDWIFE'S TALE from the opening paragraph and could not put it down. This book, set in early part of the 20th century, tells the tale of Elizabeth Whitely as she struggles with both the triumphs and the burdens of her profession, midwifery, and her own loneliness when the man she has loved most of her life falls for another. This is a love story, surely, but one not strictly confined to a relationship between a man and a woman. It illuminates the complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the friendships forged by women everywhere, and intricate ties of a close-knit community.A lovely, moving novel.
Rating:
Summary: A truly wonderful read
Review: I was given this book to read by a friend who suggested that we consider it for one of our monthly book club readings. I had not heard of the author and have to admit that I waited a couple of weeks before picking the book up to read. Let me say that I am an avid reader. I belong to a book club that has been meeting once a month for 13 years. This book was beautiful and so very well written. So good in fact that I wish I could contact the author! I just finished the book last night, so I'm a bit spellbound. I loved the characters in the book and especially the interesting story. This is a talented writer and I hope to see more from her. Definitely a book we will read and discuss as a group. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: An irresistible historical fiction
Review: I'm an avid armchair space- and time-traveler, and this book whizzed me away and made me want to stay there until I was done. The sights, smells, sounds, and textures of pristine, rural Appalachia are powerfully evoked in this brilliant first novel, which also happens to have a creative and compelling plot.
I heartily disagree with the reader who found the speech of the characters contrived; don't/didn't people in different places and times speak differently than we do? I found the dialogue to mirror the psychological portraits that were painted of the characters - women who, for example, said "hush now" and nurtured men who, by modern definitions, tried to rape them. I very much enjoyed this book's exploration of morality, religion, spirituality, societal roles and expectations of women, midwives' roles in and attitudes towards women's health and birth in that time and place. This is a wonderful book on so many levels.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: I'm giving it one star because the writer is a beginner. But truly, this will disappoint anyone who believes the Kirkus Review quote about "evocative storytelling." Evocative maybe in the John-Boy Walton sense. That is to say, this is old fashioned, something I can imagine Ronald Reagan keeping on his bedside table. Like another review said, others of another generation did this kind of writing quite some time ago; it reminds me of some things I read anthologized in my 1960s era high school readers of writers who even then were considered passe. It has to do with the folksy diciton, the homespun "natural" voice of the personable narrator. Cloying folksy quaintness. Unnatural. Thoroughly unmodern. Thoroughly conservative. Not just a little, well, for lack of a better word, backward, even redneck. I like this quote from a previous reviewer: "It's got a down-home veneer that reminds me of students in a high school play laboring to drop their g's 'cause this here is a log cabin, yessirree bob, now let's go git our milkin' chores did." Exactly. Obviously, there's a readership for this kind of stuff. I'm not among them. I'd recommend the writer catch up on some modern--no make that 20th century--writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and then perhaps some of the more contemporary classics like Updike and Didion. Drop out of writing school and join the modern age!
Rating:
Summary: I was up till 4 o'clock this morning finishing this book!
Review: Imagine a novel that's not at all hip or sarcastic, a novel that's timeless, one that you'd want to pass along to your mother, to your daughter, to your best friend. Gretchen Laskas has given us such a novel. In it, she conjures up the speech and perceptions of a backwoods woman in early 20th century West Virginia - a midwife - and she does this gracefully and without a trace of condescension. This is the kind of book you just want to inhabit - it all seems so real. I'll keep it on my classics shelf alongside TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and Annie Dillard's AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD...
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