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A wonderful story about midwifery and women's ancestral knowledge, pitted against the dawn of male dominated modern medicine in early 20th century Nova Scotia. The characters both male and female are so finely drawn they lodge in your heart and the feeling that some of the "lost knowledge" passed down from the older generation of women isn't really completely lost at all gives one some hope for the future.

An arresting portrait of the struggles that women faced for control of their own bodies, The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare—the first daughter in five generations of Rares.

As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and unfulfilling sex lives. During the turbulent World War I era, uncertainty and upheaval accompany the arrival of a brash new medical doctor and his promises of progress and fast, painless childbirth. In a clash between tradition and science, Dora finds herself fighting to protect the rights of women as well as the wisdom that has been put into her care.

Ami McKay's work has aired on various Canadian radio programs. Her documentary, Daughter of Family G, won an Excellence in Journalism Medallion at the 2003 Atlantic Journalism Awards. Originally from Indiana, she now lives with her family in a former birth house in Scots Bay, Nova Scotia.

416 pages