{"id":707,"date":"2006-03-10T22:41:01","date_gmt":"2006-03-11T03:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=707"},"modified":"2006-03-23T20:26:54","modified_gmt":"2006-03-24T01:26:54","slug":"the-midwifes-apprentice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/03\/10\/the-midwifes-apprentice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Midwife’s Apprentice"},"content":{"rendered":"

1996 Newbery Medal Winner: The Midwife’s Apprentice, by Karen Cushman<\/p>\n\nThe Plot<\/b>
\nLife is hard in the dark ages, especially for a girl with no family, no money and no place to live. But things start to look up for one such girl when a village midwife offers her some food in exchange for work. Eventually she begins to pick up the magic and knowledge of midwifery, but her lack of confidence in herself continues to hamper her progress. She finally gives up and leaves the village, finding work at a nearby inn.<\/p>\n

My Thoughts<\/b>
\nUnlike the wary feeling I’ve had when approaching many of these books, this one I was actually looking forward to reading. And it didn’t disappoint, though the whole penniless orphan finding their place in the world is an old and threadbare theme indeed.<\/p>\n

The course this book takes is parallel in many ways to Crispin, which, having been written later, could be said to be the imitator. We start off with a cringing, downtrodden, uneducated teenager, who unexpectedly finds themselves taken under the wing of an adult. In this case, our adult is the village midwife, who uses her new charge as a servant and appears to have no intention of actually keeping her as an apprentice, no matter what the other villagers may think.<\/p>\n

But neither does she take especial care to keep our heroine, who eventually acquires the name Alyce, from learning on her own. Thus the first half of the book shows Alyce acquiring some confidence in herself and her skills and coming to view herself as a real person with potential and rights. As she develops this sense of self, the other villagers begin to treat her more respectfully as well. This all culminates in a series of events where Alyce cleverly exposes the hypocrisy and sin of those villagers who were rude to her in the past.<\/p>\n

The second half of the book is more problematic: after displaying this incredible nerve, Alyce suddenly regresses, collapsing into a pile of self-pitying jelly after a professional setback. I think the story would have flowed better had the incidents been reversed. Alyce should have run off to the inn and regained her confidence and then after returning to the village, assured of her place, she could have taken her revenge. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me that she felt comfortable tricking everyone yet was still so fragile.<\/p>\n

And at the end, the book didn’t resolve some of the issues it had raised. For instance, during her stay at the inn, Alyce, through her exposure to a man working there, begins to learn to read. But after her departure, this wasn’t really followed up on. What will being able to read mean for her? We’re never told, and, in fact, it seems as if this skill is completely useless, since she doesn’t appear to have been hampered by it before.\n<\/pracut>\n

In Short<\/b>
\n8.5\/10. A satisfying read. Though the main character, Alyce, had her annoying moments, I felt they were all in character for her, if not in character in the order they occurred. My only quibble is that there were some threads left hanging, and I’d like to know what happened next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1996 Newbery Medal Winner: The Midwife’s Apprentice, by Karen Cushman The Plot Life is hard in the dark ages, especially for a girl with no family, no money and no place to live. But things start to look up for one such girl when a village midwife offers her some food in exchange for work. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}