As a child in a small village in Nova Scotia, she is befriended by Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a kitchen filled with herbs and folk remedies, and a talent for telling tales.
‘The Birth House’ is the story of Dora Rare, the first female to be born in five generations of Rares. Intelligent, quirky, passionate, and funny, it deserves a wide readership and a long shelf life.Spanning the 20th century, Ami Mckay takes a primitive and superstitious rural community in Nova Scotia and creates a rich tableau of characters to tell the story of childbirth from its most secretive early practices to modern maternity as we know it. 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.
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