As advertised on the cover, Call the Midwife is “a memoir of birth, joy, and hard times.” As a fan of the PBS series since its inception, I hesitated to read the original journal on which this true story is built. After all, you can’t improve on perfection, can you? Maybe you can.
The three books were “assigned” at our Third Tuesday Book Club at the Alvin, TX ,public library. I volunteered to read the first book, to be sure someone had read each of the three books in the set. I was surprised at the amount of “extra” material that was not detailed in the PBS series. The history of British Midwifery in the introduction was instructive, and the writer’s stories/anecdotes were “better than TV.”
Some of the details were graphic, and in a few cases, I preferred the “cleaned up” version I had seen on TV. There is humor, tragedy, great joy, and proves the saying, “Every child is a gift from God.” I will probably skip the second book which deals with the Workhouse, but I will definitely read the third book, which has a lot of humor as society “progresses” into the sixties, a nostalgic time for me.
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