Early in the novel, Dora’s Aunt Fran quotes from The Science of a New Life: “It is almost impossible for a woman to read the current ‘love and murder’ literature of the day and have pure thoughts, and when the reading of such literature is associated with idleness-as it almost invariably is-a woman’s thoughts and feelings cannot be other than impure and sensual.” How does reading shape Dora’s view of the world? How does her love of books play into her relationship with her father? With Miss B.? With Archer?Ģ. Intelligent, quirky, passionate, and funny, it deserves a wide readership and a long shelf life.1. Despite (or because of) all this stylistic variety, The Birth House builds up a strong narrative momentum. McKay makes ingenious use of diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings real and imagined, invitations, and old wives’ remedies. Meanwhile, she is courted, married, and then abandoned by a feckless husband. He counters with charges of malpractice, precipitating her flight to Boston.

With the staunch support of the Occasional Knitters Society, she fights Thomas’s hostile takeover. Young though she is, Dora knows that pain and danger are inseparable from life.

Gilbert Thomas, an ambitious, unscrupulous obstetrician, arrives in Scots Bay with promises of safe, painless childbirth. Gradually Dora becomes the guardian of age-old female knowledge under threat from modern technology. Issues of women’s rights and freedoms are never far from the novel’s surface.

McKay sets The Birth House against the historical backdrop of war, influenza, the Halifax Explosion, and the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. At 17 Dora is chosen to be an apprentice and successor to the local midwife, Miss Babineau, an old Acadian woman widely viewed as a witch. Like Montgomery’s Anne, Jane, and Emily, McKay’s Dora Rare is an exceptional young woman, descendant of a Scottish woman shipwrecked on the Bay of Fundy and a Mi’kMaq man named Silent Rare. Her engaging first novel, set in rural Nova Scotia around the time of the First World War, also calls to mind the enormously popular fiction of L.M. Although she is Knopf’s New Face of Fiction for 2006, Ami McKay springs from a venerable tradition of Maritime storytelling.

The birth house by ami mckay