MIDWIVES

Leonard is an emphatic, enthusiastic narrator in this legal drama. But her effusive reading, particularly in giving voice to Sybil Danforth, the one-time hippie turned Vermont midwife, sometimes verges on excess. Occasionally, she is more distracting than enhancing, especially when she makes some unfortunate, half-hearted stabs at a New England accent. But, eventually Leonard settles down and becomes more and more convincing as the momentum of the novel takes hold. Sybil is charged with manslaughter after performing an emergency C-section on a woman she believed to be dead. Sybil always retains her hold on our sympathies even as she and her teenaged daughter Connie come to question her judgments. The novel raises troubling questions about what happens when well-meaning people make tragic mistakes. M.O. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/JUL 00]