Midwife of the Blue Ridge by Christine Blevins

Review and BOOK GIVEAWAY

Midwife of The Blue Ridge by Christine Blevins

Fiction, Berkley Trade Paperback, 417 pgs.

Released August 2008

Historical fiction demands a great deal of a writer, not just in the way of accuracy of details and believable characters, but also a strong sense of time and place. Christine Blevins achieves this nicely in Midwife of the Blue Ridge. Dominated by a sense of adventure with a strong underlying romance that works its way through the story, it's a rewarding read.

Maggie Duncan, adopted by a midwife after surviving the destruction of her village in 1740s Scotland, finds herself an outcast when the midwife dies. Trained in midwifery and the healing arts, she is still looked upon as a person cursed by the very fact of her survival of that slaughter. Superstition prevents her from practicing her craft and she is considered unmarriageable. She is forced to sell herself into indentured servitude in the New World. She reaches America persued by a drunken brute of a nobleman's son, one Julian Cavendish, who wants to buy her for his own purposes. He is furious when outsmarted and her contract of service is purchased by a decent man, a settler-farmer named Seth Martin. With three children and a pregnant and ailing wife, Maggie is the answer to their prayers. But these are colonial times and life is anything but easy for those trying to tame the primitive wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virgina.

There is the usual mix of compelling characters you'd expect here. Farmers and settlers, trappers and hunters, frontiersmen and frontier widows, soldiers and Indians, and the requisite scoundrels and reprobates. When Maggie develops a strong attachment to Tom Roberts, a tall handsome trapper, she is bound for disappointment. He is a wanderer who appears now and again and lives outdoors and wants no other kind of life. It's not long before raids by Shawnee war parties drive the surrounding settlers, including the Martins and Maggie into the closest fort for protection. After some weeks of that terror in close quarters and deprived living conditions, they return home to find Cavendish in their lives again, legal papers in hand, land-grabbing and forcing people out of their homes. Maggie bargains for leniency for Seth and his family and lets Cavendish take her, hoping to escape later. She will suffer at his hands but make new friends before she ends up in the hands of the Indians and sees how they live and take revenge for the white man's atrocities. Danger has many faces for a young women of the times.

The story is rich with details of plants and medicines, food and clothing, tools and weapons of the period. The author seems to have done her homework in that regard. The Scottish dialect of some of the characters adds appropriate colour. The story is compelling and the book really is hard to put down. There are a couple of scenes of violence that are graphic, including a rape. There's swearing but I cannot imagine frontiersmen and roughnecks all speaking like pastors. For this is not a romance per se as the cover may at first suggest. It is historical fiction and adventure as well. The author gives us all the best and worst of frontier life; the hopes and fears, the hardships and the rewards. It is a job well done. Four stars out of five.

Christine Blevins homepage: http://christineblevins.com/

Thank you to the author for the review copy she sent me.

 

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In Conjunction With Book Blogger Appreciation Week (click on the logo in sidebar) I am having a GIVEAWAY.

I'm giving away my ARC copy of Midwife of the Blue Ridge by Christine Blevins.

Open worldwide until midnight Sunday, September 21, 2008.

1) To enter tell me which book is at the top of your fiction wishlist right now and why you want to read it. (Longer comments are encouraged but not required.)
2) If you blog about this giveaway and put a link back to it, I'll give you a second entry. If you don't have a blog, email 3 friends telling them about this giveaway and copying me at sfuhringer(at) sympatico(dot) ca.

Please leave a contact address if you're entering the giveaway and don't have a blog where I can contact you.

Winner will be announced on Monday, September 22,2008.

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This book is part of the LibraryThing Author Challenge