Hannah, Mormon Midwife By Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards Shadow Mountain (Salt Lake City), 1997. Hardcover: 328 pages. ISBN: 1-57345-280-7 Suggested retail price: $16.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Scott Parkin

Intro/Disclaimer

Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards is my friend Russell W. Asplund's aunt, so it was with a combination of intense interest and mild trepidation that I sat down to read and review her latest book, Hannah, Mormon Midwife.

I was interested because Edwards is one of a few Mormon writers who makes an adequate living purely from her writing. She has published twelve books with both national and regional publishers, and is one of only a few Mormon authors I know of purely by her reputation as a successful author. She does now the same thing that I hope to do some day -- make a living from writing fiction.

I was a little nervous for the obvious reason -- that she's my friend's aunt, and I didn't want to not like my friend's aunt's book. I was also a mite concerned for the less obvious reason that Edwards writes romances and I have never successfully read a romance; not even a "big" one like The Thornbirds; even when they're labelled and marketed as "historical epics." I don't connect with such books, partially because they're written for women and emphasize things that just plain miss me, and partially because I find them to be a tad long on descriptions of place and time, and a tad short on real characterization.

Because I do not read many romances or historical novels, I don't know whether some of the things that bothered me with this book are standard features of the genre or not, so many of my comments may only point out what an experienced reader of historical romance already expects.

But I read it anyway, and now I'll review it. As it turns out, all of my hopes and concerns were realized in a book that kept me engaged, but left me feeling flat when it was all done.

What It Is

This book is a romance novel patterned after the historical romances popular on the national market, with an apparent target audience of young (18-30 year-old) women. It is intended for a general audience and contains no explicit scenes, though there are a lot of crushed lips and passionate, though chaste, embraces.

The story is set in 1870s Ogden, Utah and surrounding areas, and revolves around the Childress clan, an apparently polygamous family and founding members of the Ogden community. The story focuses on the father, William Childress, his wife Julia, and their two daughters, Hannah and Eliza. As the novel starts, Hannah is eighteen and Eliza is sixteen. They are living on a farm outside Ogden, which they work with their mother, Julia.

The novel focuses on Hannah, but it's also about the Childress family, about Ogden's and Salt Lake City's change from rural settlements to modern cities, and about the evolution of both social attitudes and scientific progress. The book is about the clash of changing people, places, attitudes, and expectations.

We follow Hannah as she finds herself becoming an adult and taking on adult responsibilities. Like most rural children, she has learned responsibility and stewardship young, and feels a greater weight of duty than her half-sisters in the city. Her life is spent doing what is necessary and meeting her commitments; leisure is a frivolous whim, and the desire for pleasure a minor sin. She has been taught a Victorian ethic that both chafes and binds.

When her mother has a difficult childbirth that eventually takes her life, Hannah becomes driven to learn more about medicine and midwivery, and to become something of a social activist against the Victorian ethic that treats childbirth as shameful, as well as a local superstition that childbirth must be done "in pain and sorrow."

When her mother dies on her wedding day, Hannah's failure to save her combines with guilt at indulging her personal desires for marriage to close her off emotionally. It leads her to separate herself more and more from her husband, sister, and father. She struggles with the many duties she feels bound to -- Mormon, wife, midwife, homemaker, caregiver to an infant brother -- and finds that she does not know how to define herself. She is childless, and feels the reproach of a society that defines feminine success as motherhood. Since she has no children of her own, she focuses outward on helping other women bear their children. The pressure builds on her until she separates herself completely from all those who love her, and she eventually comes to see that her life must change -- either in separation from her old life and a total devotion to medicine, or in discovery of herself and acceptance of the love of her family.

It should come as no surprise which choice she makes, but her route to that choice is one that left me wondering what messages the author was trying to offer. This is a modern story of the struggle of women to find their place, set against the backdrop of rural Utah and Idaho. That mismatch made this story difficult to accept as historical romance, and is one of several things that left me feeling unsatisfied.

What It Isn't

This is not a "Mormon" novel in that it isn't about the Church in any way. Utah is a setting, and polygamy is a fact, but the book is not about Mormonism or whether the church is true. It's a historical romance set in Utah, and uses facts as backdrops to characters, not as characters of themselves. The polygamy was sufficiently understated that I had to go back and reread the opening to make sure it was really there.

I found that refreshing and applaud the effort. More stories should be told that are about people who happen to be Mormons, not about Mormonism itself. While it may violate the call for more Deseret School literature, it satisfied in me a desire to see stories about my people that treat us as people, not as icons or representations of a religio-philosophic class.

Good Writing

This is a well-written book. The language is simple, but energetic, and it kept me turning pages throughout. The author obviously cared a great deal about both the characters and the settings, and that care came through in solid descriptive writing that painted broad pictures without going into the excruciating detail that many historicals go to. The writing was sufficiently easy to read that it kept me engaged even when I began to dislike all of the major characters.

Edwards shows off her research into the practice of medicine and midwivery in 1870 in small, fairly dense chunks that don't interfere too much with the general pace of the novel.

I will have to admit, though, that I found myself reading this novel with a southern accent. Something about the characters and their speech patterns made me think "Gone With the Wind" (the film version; I've never read the book). Perhaps it was the slightly overstated eloquence of the main characters and their tendency to speak in pronouncements. Or perhaps it was the tendency to punctuate so much of the dialog with exclamation points -- I came across as many as five per page during dialog-intensive scenes.

It was still easy to read, though, and the clear writing held my interest even when the story lagged somewhat behind.

Difficult Pacing

Where I began to be frustrated by the book was in its slow pace. As has been mentioned elsewhere, this is a book about "Hannah, Mormon Midwife," and yet there was no hint of midwivery until page 120-ish, and even that was a passive act during her mother's childbirth. She doesn't take up midwivery for others until well past page 200, and almost reaches page 300 (of 328) before she gets any formal schooling.

This book moves slowly. It sets up conflicts, then meanders through details of family life and frontier politics without moving toward either escalation or resolution of those conflicts. It features characters saying the same things two and three times in the same half-page, then reiterating it two pages later. It features dialog tags that interpret the words just spoken. It spends a lot of time making sure we saw what just happened, rather than moving on the the next event.

If that space had been devoted to creating vivid characters, I might not have been bothered by the pace of the events in this story. Hannah is a complicated character who deserved to have her thoughts examined, her motivations explained. Instead, the most common approach was to have Hannah start to deal with the very obvious problems in her life, then back off with a simple "But it was too hard to think about that" and continue acting in a destructive manner that was not effectively justified to me as a reader. Her tragedies were not so great that they served as explanation.

Which is perhaps my biggest complaint about this book. We didn't get enough detail about formative experiences to give depth or reason to the actions that follow. Yes, Hannah's mother taught her to do her duty first and mistrust frivolous desire. But Hannah's devotion to duty is clearly beyond anything her mother taught her, and is a sign of deep emotional problems that are not defined within the pages of the book. Her father's and husband's endless comments about her "wild and unfettered heart" do not explain simple irrationality, especially when we never see her act in a wild and unfettered manner. We're told she's a free spirit, but we never see it; she spends the entire book mooning over the weight of responsibility crushing her life.

Even then, I might have been engaged by the story except that the tags told me Hannah was a caring person "with a great heart" at the same time her actions portrayed her as deeply self-indulgent, judgemental, and sometimes just mean. This mismatch is something that I never recovered from while reading the book, and is why I ended up being unsatisfied by it.

Conclusion

Despite the amount of criticism I've offered here, I think there is a clear audience for this book that will be powerfully touched by its story. For my tastes it was a little too melodramatic, a little too broad in its creation of characters. It gave neither a grand sweep of history, nor a detailed account of the minds of the main characters, though it did offer a broad picture of 1870s Ogden and the Childress family.

In many ways it reads like a novelization of a personal journal, with real events separated from their contexts, and effects understood only in retrospect. The characters reacted to their surroundings, but we didn't see them actively puzzle out their pain or seek solutions to problems. There was a distance from the minds of the characters, as though the narrative were constructed from a timeline and a quote sheet, not from vivid images in the author's mind.

This may be the very definition of the modern historical romance. If it is, then Hannah, Mormon Midwife is a fine example of the genre. For me, though, the story was slow, the characters pale, and the messages mixed. It'll be a while before I read another Mormon historical romance.

Sorry, Russell. I wanted to like your aunt's book, but I just didn't.

Scott Parkin