The Last Midwife

Gracy is a midwife in a small mining town in Colorado. She has a deep love of midwifery and is devoted to her family. Reading her story draws the reader into the life of a woman and a midwife living in 1880. Life was hard, you had to be tough to survive and Gracy was this; but she was also warm, caring and prided herself on being trustworthy.

But not everything is idyllic; the story has tension and mystery. One of most influential men in this small town accuses Gracy of murdering his son. This was an interesting twist for several reasons; it throws some light on the court systems back then and it shows the treatment of women in this time period. Gracy was easy to like, but all the characters were well developed and at the end of the book, I had a new appreciation of the advances we made as a society.