Once a Midwife

Once a Midwife is the sequel to Patricia Harman's fantastic The Midwife of Hope River, and on it's own merits, it would be a more-than-fine read. It does pale a bit in comparison to the original work, though. But, first:

Once a Midwife jumps ahead from the early days of the Great Depression to the early days of World War II and finds Patience and Daniel long-married and with a houseful of children, some born to them and some adopted through the hardships of 1930s life in West Virginia. In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, both Patience and Daniel are staunchly isolationist and anti-war, but when Pearl Harbor is attacked and Hitler's madness becomes clearer, a wedge grows between them as Patience tries to reconcile the man she believed Daniel to be with the man he has become.

Ultimately, the relationship between them, and Daniel's continued refusal to register with the selective service, is the main plot. And it's not a bad plot, but it's not what I was expecting, either. I better enjoyed the first book, with its focus on Patience and her work as a midwife and the patients themselves than I did their domestic discord. What's more, in writing the conflict as she did, I felt Harman did a disservice to Patience. Specifically, we see Patience worrying, constantly, over the threat of Daniel going to jail, and what that will mean for her and the children and their little farm.

I don't doubt she would have worried, but give the steely empathy Patience showed repeatedly in the first book, and sporadically throughout this sequel, it would have felt more authentic to me had she reflected more on the parallels of their situation and that of every other family where the husband, son, father, brother was being sent to fight. Patience reflects repeatedly on the difficulties of being apart, but given the broader circumstances of the time, this rang a bit hollow for me.

Sequels are rarely, in my experience, as good as the original (I'm looking at you, This Side of Glory and Heaven and Hell), and this one isn't bad. But if the first book was five stars, this one is three-and-a-half or four.