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Twelve Babies on a Bike: Diary of a Pupil Midwife - Dot May Dunn
by katyj10
This is a review of the 2009 book 'Twelve babies on a bike' by Dot May Dunn. It is a true account, written diary style of her time as a pupil midwife in 1956. I enjoyed reading 'Call the Midwife' and expected something similar in this book.
The title
The title of this book makes reference to the qualification a student ... midwife had to make after training, delivering twelve babies during a set time period in their own homes rather than a hospital setting. After this the students were eligible to take an exam which would finalise their status as a Midwife rather than a nurse. At this time, most nurses got around the community on bike and only the very senior were fortunate enough to have the use of a car. The bike not only had to carry the nurse but also all their equipment which included a large box containing the gas and air pain relief.
Format
The book is written as a diary and even bottles down to the time of day so you can see how each labour story progresses time wise. It was great to appreciate that the phone could ring in the Midwife's house at any time of the day and Dot was expected to answer and react appropriately to the caller. A lot of the time it was guesswork as the panicking husbands forget to tell her their name or where they live!
Content
As well as the technical information about the birth, there is a little insight into Dot's social life and family at the time although this is secondary to the birthing information. Dot has a great sense of humour and shares some of the more funny moments she experienced in other people's homes that she was not comfortable admitting at the time. Broken beds, pesky kids, wrong use of the gas and air and a talking bird all play an important part in creating the parts that make this book a great read.
My thoughts
I loved this book and whilst it was read in chunks over 24 hours (so didn't last very long) I was glad that I had got hold of it. There were a few parallels with the other book I read which is also a TV series 'Call the Midwife' but this is to be expected as it is covering a similar time and ultimately focuses on trainee midwives.
Final word
I would recommend this book as an amusing and insightful look into midwifery in the 1950s. A lot of the staff went beyond the call of duty with the families they cared for and Dot's twelve cases are all good examples of how textbook birth should not be! She can't believe her luck when she delivers twins, babies in a breech position, calls the flying squad for blood transfusions and awaits delayed placenta deliveries, it's enough to scare you to death. Ultimately though, Dot is an excellent nurse and midwife and seems to have a second sense around what is happening. Her mentor is also a supportive yet challenging midwife who turns up when needed and lets Dot take the lead when she thinks she is coping well.
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The Woman in the Fifth - Douglas Kennedy
by Puggers
In many ways, The Woman in the Fifth is classic Douglas Kennedy. All of the staple ingredients are here: the stranger in a strange land trying to escape something back home, the plucky underdog pitched into a situation that's bigger, badder and murkier than they'd initially imagined, the alluring mysterious female and the naive, ... impulsive man.
This doesn't describe all of Kennedy's novels, but enough fall neatly into this pattern that's it's easy to recognise the motifs. Happily, also present here is the sharp sense of place and moment that Kennedy evokes pitched against a plot that rackets up the intrigue and tension to compelling, "just-one-more-page!" levels.
Yet it's also something of a departure in that the protagonist's mountains of ill fortune plunge him somewhere beyond the type of gritty, real-life drama that Kennedy usually writes of, and has him wandering into a world that's more ethereal and altogether more sketchily-drawn.
Said protagonist, Harry Ricks, pitches up in Paris a desperate man - having lost his family, job and social standing back home in America, he spends his first week in the throes of a sickness that costs him a large chunk of his meagre finances. With little other option, he ends up living in a squalid building owned by a local crime boss, haunted by the mess he's made of his life and dredging up an income in a shady night-time job.
In the midst of all this self-pity and darkness, though, light comes in the form of Margit - a Hungarian divorcee with whom Harry enters into a stop-start affair. Slowly clawing himself back into financial stability and with a passionate, enigmatic woman reciprocating his advances, things seem to be looking up - but then (most inconsiderately), people start dying in unfortunate ways, and Harry is forced to face up to this new, grimy mess he's got himself into.
Like the author's other books, this is addictive storytelling that manages to skilfully straddle the realms of literary fiction and fast-paced thriller. Harry's gloom and self-pity permeates the novel, and the supporting cast are wonderfully well-judged characters, complementing and clashing with Harry in all the right ways. If some are on the face of it slightly clichéd, they are so well-written that it barely registers.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of this book is that it manages to skip between so many genres without slipping up on any of them - it's a great thriller, a beguiling love story, a modern ghost tale and it could even masquerade as a travel memoir, detailing the shadowy underbelly of Paris-lesser-seen.
If there's a negative, it's that this breadth of focus dilutes the strength of the tale just a fraction. Because of the nature of the story, the ending is less cut-and-dried than Kennedy's books tend to be. This is a strength and a weakness - it's an enduring, evocative finale, but it does mean the book goes with a bit of a whimper.
It's not his most affecting read - for me, The Moment takes that title - but it compares extremely favourably to the calibre of the rest of his work. There's something to appeal to just about everyone here - as at the heart of it, whatever genre it belongs to, it's just a darn good story.
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Love Virtually - Daniel Glattauer
by zoe_page_1
When Emmi sends and email to cancel a magazine subscription, she has no idea what a slight typo in the email address will lead to - a life-changing, potentially marriage-wrecking, all-consuming online love affair with the man whom she emails in error. What starts as an insignificant, casual message quickly becomes something much more ... important to both her and Leo as two people who have never met start to share their secrets and wishes, dreams and fears with each other, not just because they can but, it seems, because they have to.
We don't know where the book is set other than it's a German-speaking city, but that is immaterial anyway as the story takes place entirely online. There are lots of books that use email to tell the story, either partly or in its entirety (the classic E: A Novel springs to mind), but this one is a bit different. For one thing, the messages include only a subject line, and the text itself. We aren't told who is sending each one (but though it's not a direct back and forth, you can usually still tell who is writing from what and how things are said) and we're also not given a date or time. Instead, each paragraph is preceded by a 'one minute later' or 'the next morning' giving you immediate understanding of the passage of time, but no on-going reminders - it's hard to keep track of how long those minutes and days add up to as pages pass, since each new email is referenced only in relation to the one that came before. In a lot of ways it's like reading a play as everything else is stripped away, leaving behind nothing but pure dialogue. This is a book of emails and nothing else, so some of these have to be a bit longer to provide background to the story and the characters, but this comes across naturally and not forced in the way some emails, or indeed diary entries, in other books can.
Originally published in German, and subsequently translated by a husband and wife team, each taking the voice of one of our characters, this book has a unique style. The characters are nicely defined, but then there are only two of them. Emmi is married with kids but though she talks about them, the off spring never make an appearance. Leo we know even less about as he's not inclined to share. The writing has a slightly sterile feel to it at times, similar to some Scandinavian work, though to determine whether this was how it started or simply how the translation means it ended, I'd have to get my hands on the original - something I might just do because it's written in such a way that I don't think the German would be too challenging. An ideal book for language students, perhaps, since the modern language (and modern style) make it much more accessible than some more classic literature.
It doesn't sizzle in quite the same way as 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' does, but there's an undeniable tension between the couple from very early on which aborted attempts to meet and a failure to swap photos only add to: for this pair, it's all about how they write rather than what they look like, and while there's the speculation you would predict from both sides, nothing is truly confirmed or denied. The story builds well with the ending quite unexpected, a proper stop and gape moment, and I was left wanting more (and ready for the promised - but as yet unavailable - sequel).
It is a truly compelling read and had me far more intrigued than I thought it would at the start. It's easy to flit through, perfect for picking up and putting down (think of it as waiting for the next email to arrive) and was far better than I thought it might be.
Highly recommended!
Out now in paperback...and ebook form (natch)
This review first appeared on www.thebookbag.co.uk
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