The Midwife's Secret
Mar. 7th, 2023 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Midwife's Secret by Emily Gunnis links three timelines (1945, 1969 and 2017), tracking the fortunes of two connected families and the estate they share. There are child disappearances, accusations of murder, property fraud, closely guarded secrets, estrangements and plenty of relationship drama.
Certain weaknesses in the narrative did undermine the tension - death dates on the family tree at the beginning revealed the fates of certain characters too soon, repetitive details and background information in later timelines revealed certain historical aspects before the earlier narrative threads reached them, and an admittedly pivotal letter was reproduced in the text no less than three times, in case we missed it before...
It was also confusing that the featured puppy was gendered repeated as both male and female, sometimes within the same paragraph.
However, all that said, the disparate narratives did all come together in an impressive fashion that I would never be able to create in one of my novels, and I was invested in what happened both to Willow (the 2017 protagonist) and Vanessa (the mother of one missing child and the grandmother of the other).
It was very sad and quite grim in places - and I was a bit disappointed by Willow's sudden change of heart about something in particular right at the end - but the story kept me reading avidly throughout (I finished the book in three days) and the eventual tying up of all the various threads worked very well.
Certain weaknesses in the narrative did undermine the tension - death dates on the family tree at the beginning revealed the fates of certain characters too soon, repetitive details and background information in later timelines revealed certain historical aspects before the earlier narrative threads reached them, and an admittedly pivotal letter was reproduced in the text no less than three times, in case we missed it before...
It was also confusing that the featured puppy was gendered repeated as both male and female, sometimes within the same paragraph.
However, all that said, the disparate narratives did all come together in an impressive fashion that I would never be able to create in one of my novels, and I was invested in what happened both to Willow (the 2017 protagonist) and Vanessa (the mother of one missing child and the grandmother of the other).
It was very sad and quite grim in places - and I was a bit disappointed by Willow's sudden change of heart about something in particular right at the end - but the story kept me reading avidly throughout (I finished the book in three days) and the eventual tying up of all the various threads worked very well.
