"Alyce. Not Brat or Dung Beetle"

An orphan girl of indeterminate age literally makes a name for herself in THE MIDWIFE'S APPRENTICE, Karen Cushman's Newbery-winning second novel. Medieval England is the setting for this brief but very vivid story of the nameless child who is found one morning outside a small village, curled up in a dung heap the warmth of which is all that has kept her from freezing to death in the night. The village midwife takes her in, lets her sleep on the floor, and feeds her just enough to enable her to work at all the routine tasks medieval life requires. Talk about child labor ... and lousy working conditions!

Gradually the child makes friends with the midwife's cat, in a fashion remarkably unsentimental for the protagonist of a children's book. ("Damn you, cat, breathe and live, you flea-bitten sod, or I'll kill you myself.") They are allies, helping each other escape the routine abuse of boys in the village. "Always they were the scrawniest or the ugliest or the stupidest boys, picked on by everyone else, with no one left uglier or stupider than they but her." Eventually the child saves one boy's life. He then ill-treats her less often! This is NOT an overly-optimistic book.

The child is sent to gather the plants, leeches and spiderwebs used by the midwife in her trade, and is expected to carry the basket full of materials to each confinement, and then to wait outside. And she begins to suspect that she is being banished not for her clumsiness and stupidity, as the midwife announces, but for fear that she will learn how her sharp-tongued mistress accomplishes the miracle of bringing a baby into the world.

She begins to watch through cottage windows ....

THE MIDWIFE'S APPRENTICE is more than a coming-of-age story, for this little girl approaching womanhood has been so deprived of what we now consider normal human attachments that she must rapidly (perhaps too rapidly?) re-experience each stage of emotional development from basic trust on, eventually progressing past maternal instinct and into self-respect, if not self-actualization. This would be a lot to accomplish in one hundred and twenty-two pages even without having to learn a complicated craft consisting as much of applied psychology as of herbalism, common sense and superstition. It helps Alyce -- although not the novel's credibility -- that the midwife totally changes course for no apparent reason at the end of the story. Nevertheless this is a psychologically hurried book, although it does not seem to have been a hurriedly-written one. Perhaps it IS overly-optimistic, after all.

Cushman's take on the Middle Ages is satisfyingly grubby, pungent and otherwise tactile: both the beauty and the messiness of nature are everywhere for characters who live so "close to the earth" that they have much in common with their animals. No castles or cloisters here! -- no fancy pageantry for those who fancy themselves as knights or ladies. (Why does no one in the Society for Creative Anachronism ever volunteer to play a peasant?) Characters are described with a sort of post-Dickensian flair laced with considerable irony, and coincidences/conveniences are Dickensian also. But no long-lost relation shows up to be a parent to this child. Alyce must not only name but raise herself -- in effect accomplishing the miracle of being her own midwife, of bringing herself into the world.


The book contains rude language and coarse behavior, as did the era in which it is set, but is (otherwise?) suitable for children in the secondary grades and certainly for those in middle school. CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY, by the same author, is set in the same era, won the same award and is more clearly deserving of the Newbery Medal. THE DOOR IN THE WALL, by Marguerite de Angeli, probably deserved said Medal when it won many decades ago: its version of the Middle Ages was considerably sanitized, but no more so than most versions of reality being presented to children in literature at that time.