Call The Midwife- Steph's Book Review

      Have I mentioned previously how much I enjoy book club? Well I do. This month was particularly enjoyable as I loved the book and it provided excellent discussion. We chose to read Call The Midwife because we had all heard of the TV series but none of us have started watching it yet. One of my friends did actually watch the first episode quite some time ago but she was pregnant with her third child and as she was watching she burst into tears and turned it off. Now that her baby is over a year old she decided it would be OK to try the book and see how it went.
 
     We all really loved it. As a content disclaimer there is a portion of the book that deals with prostitution in the slums of London. There is a whole chapter that is very sexually explicit and also very sad. However, as one of my friends commented, the author keeps such an upbeat and really pretty jovial tone throughout the book that we weren't overly disturbed. So anyway that's really the only content warning for the book.

   If any of you have ever read All Creatures Great and Small by James Harriot, the British veterinarian you will have a good idea of how the tone and generally feeling of this book will go. She is an excellent writer, very easy to follow and easy to invest in all of the people she brings to life. She writes in the cockney accent so I could actually hear the conversations in my head which I love.

     The book is a memoir of Jennifer Worth's time as a midwife in London in the 1950's. I love this period in history, especially women's history as it's just after WW2 but before the explosion of the 60's. Worth comments in her forward about how the 60's brought the Pill to the general public and so birth rates went drastically down but in the 50's women were still having an average of 10+ pregnancies. She talks about what it meant to be a nurse and how she was actually safer as a nurse than many of the police officials because the status was so well respected in the community. She tells stories that make you laugh out loud. I kept reading parts of the book to my husband and I was crying I was laughing so hard. There are parts of the book that are poignant and others that are just sad.

   I loved her voice as an author and I loved the subject matter. If you are someone that is hesitant to read non fiction or anything even mildly historically based this would be a great starter for you. It's easy to read and not overly long. However, I would not recommend this to anyone that is pregnant, or is dealing with fertility issues. Childbirth and motherhood are very soft issues for most women and while there is some strictly medical view points in the book it's also told with a lot of heart.

You can find it on Amazon here: Call the Midwife
    I hope you choose to give it a shot! Happy reading!