This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Goodreads. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Inspirational Romance category.
The summary:
For nearly two hundred years, women in Ashley Tolliver’s family have practiced the art of midwifery in their mountain community. Now she wants to take her skills a step further, but attending medical school means abandoning those women to whom she has dedicated her life, the mountains she loves, and the awakening of her heart.
Ashley Tolliver has tended to the women of her small Appalachian community for years. As their midwife, she thinks she has seen it all. Until a young woman gives birth at Ashley’s home and is abducted just as Ashley tries to take the dangerously bleeding mother to the nearest hospital. Now Ashley is on a mission to find the woman and her newborn baby . . . before it’s too late.
Hunter McDermott is on a quest—to track down his birth mother. After receiving more media attention than he could ever want for being in the right place at the right time, he receives a mysterious phone call from a woman claiming to be his mother. Hunter seeks out the aid of the local midwife in the mountain town where the phone call originated—surely she can shed some light on his own family background.
Ashley isn’t prepared for the way Hunter’s entrance into her world affects her heart and her future. He reignites dreams of having her own family that she has long put aside in favor of earning her medical degree and being able to do even more for her community. But is it commitment to her calling or fear of the unknown that keeps her feet firmly planted in the Appalachian soil? Or is it something more—fear of her growing feelings for Hunter—that makes her hesitant to explore the world beyond the mountains?
Here is Goodreads's review:
I didn’t receive a 2016 RITA® Reader Challenge review for this book, so I’m compiling quotes from reviews online and using the grade average from Goodreads as a substitute.
This book has a 3.95 average, which I’m interpreting as a B+.
This was my first read by this author, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
It follows a lady who came from a long line of midwives. She wished to become a doctor so she could better help the people in the Appalachian mountains. However, to do this she must leave her current patients. Is she really ready to do this? Are her patients really the motive?
This story was enjoyable. Hunter has a mystery to solve about his birth. He needs to track down information from a midwife to figure out his roots and family.
This book held my attention and was very entertaining. I stayed up long past my bed time to follow the mystery to the end. I truly enjoyed this author, and I hope to read more.
…The Mountain Midwife was not wholly upsetting, I still enjoyed it at times and I can tell by the writing that Eakes is talented. There is great potential for others to really like this book as well, however I found parts of it to be contradictory and for that reason did not enjoy it as well as I would have liked.
Carrie Schmidt (Reading is My SuperPower) wrote:
Laurie Alice Eakes quite simply has a way with words… and with characters. I was delighted to see these strengths just as evident in The Mountain Midwife, her first contemporary novel, as in her historicals. The fact that characters in The Mountain Midwife descended from characters in two of her historical series made it just all the more thrilling for a book adorer like me…
…There were, however, still a few things I had difficulty connecting to. I liked both Ashley and Hunter, but I didn’t connect with them as much as I hoped to. Their romance seemed small and at times a bit forced amidst the bigger themes of the plot. There was good suspense and surprises along the way, but again I wasn’t as hooked in as I expected to be…
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I considered reviewing this, but the bland cover put me off.
Then considered it again when it came up as a RITA nominee, but got put off by the Kindle price (over $9 at the time, although it’s now down to a mere $7.15). I’ve read a couple of her other novels and didn’t much like them because I didn’t like the characters and didn’t feel she’d rendered the historical English settings well.
But maybe I should have read it – Carrie (above) says it’s a contemporary. I knew of Eakes as a historical fiction author and neither the cover nor the book description gave me any indication this was anything but another historical. The only hint of 2015 over 1915 is the phone call, and the description had already lost me by then.
Reading it properly now it looks as though I may have missed out on something I would have enjoyed because of an off-genre book cover and lacklustre book description.