The Midwife's Tale is a fascinating glimpse into pre-modern midwifery in the West Virginia hills. I particularly enjoyed this book because I have generations of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky ancestors (including Hatfields of Hatfield & McCoy fame), and I could see my grandmother and her mother in the midwife’s clients. Elizabeth Whitely is a paradox: a midwife who cannot conceive. She is the latest (and last) in a line of midwives, women without men. To ease her loneliness, she moves in with a widower she has loved for years to help raise his daughter, a gifted child who turns out to be a healer. Midwife's Tale is fascinating and rich in detail, both heart-warming and heart-stopping (I will never forget the red notebook; the idea that it probably existed somewhere, if only in a midwife’s memory, haunts me still). But it is flawed. There is no primary conflict, just the story of a life (albeit a very interesting one). Even worse, it doesn't end soon enough: the Rest-of-the-Story epilogue takes the power away from the previous scene. Still, it’s worth the time and the money if only for the travel to another century, deceptively close but unreachable outside of books.