Vincent Desiderio, Woman in White DressI don’t mean by listing all these components to say this is a Frankenstein kind of a book -- it’s actually a really nicely done fictional autobiography that works in all the big news events of the early 20th century while taking some interesting stands on women’s power and on science vs. traditional medicine. And if there was nothing else worthwhile in the whole book, I’d still be grateful for learning about the Boston Molasses Disaster, which I’d never heard a peep about before and assumed was McKay’s invention. It was too preposterous to believe that a large urban area could be flooded with molasses, and too ironic that it would be Boston, the home of Boston Baked Beans.
So that was cool, and, anyway, there is lots else that’s worthwhile in The Birth House.
Interesting that, like The Hindi-Bindi Club, there are recipes -- but these are for folk remedies rather than family meals.
My only quibble with the book is that I don’t think Dora, the narrator, adds up convincingly as a character. Sometimes she sounds like a sophisticated modern woman; other times a backwoods girl. Sometimes she is scornful of Miss B.; other times she takes it for granted that she is Miss B.’s spiritual heir. She seems to be in a fog about her relationships with her family. Where did her highbrow taste in literature come from given her environment? Why does she paint her life as isolated and starved when in fact it’s a pretty busy little village they’ve got going there? It might be that the author wanted to make Dora’s intuitiveness about childbirth as mystic as possible, but it doesn’t really hang together well as that. It’s disjointed; at times it’s hard to relate to Dora’s character as other than a vehicle for an imaginative take on historical events.
Amazingly enough, this doesn’t detract from an interesting, inventive, and occasionally quite suspenseful read.
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