Midwives

This heartrending tale of a midwife's worst nightmare brought to life moves back and forth between two speakers: the daughter who relates the events in her family's lives when she was 14, and her mother, the midwife whose journal entries are interspersed throughout the story. Kate Burton's reading of this tense tale is superb. Her clear, warm tone and straightforward delivery are in direct contrast to the author's suspenseful technique. The result is a heightening of the drama and tensionalready pervasive in the story. We are left on the edge of our seats until the surprising conclusion, which finally lets us go, limp and saddened, but also relieved. J.J.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Leonard is an emphatic, enthusiastic narrator in this legal drama. But her effusive reading, particularly in giving voice to Sybil Danforth, the one-time hippie turned Vermont midwife, sometimes verges on excess. Occasionally, she is more distracting than enhancing, especially when she makes some unfortunate, half-hearted stabs at a New England accent. But, eventually Leonard settles down and becomes more and more convincing as the momentum of the novel takes hold. Sybil is charged with manslaughter after performing an emergency C-section on a woman she believed to be dead. Sybil always retains her hold on our sympathies even as she and her teenaged daughter Connie come to question her judgments. The novel raises troubling questions about what happens when well-meaning people make tragic mistakes. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine