Book Spotlight #Giveaway! The Runaway Midwife by Patricia Harman #TheRunawayMidwife

I have sooooo many books! The Book Spotlight Giveaway feature that I post every Saturday is a way for me to clear my shelves and to share some of the many books I have. This feature is a way for my to cull my collection and to give someone else the opportunity to enjoy these treasures.

I read this book in 2017 when it came out. You can read my thoughts below.

**I want to take a sec right here to announce that I am planning on doing something different for my Book Spotlight Giveaway posts in the near future. I'm still planning on putting up a weekly giveaway, I just want to change it up a little bit. 

My question for you, oh faithful followers, is.... 

What would you like to see as entry options to enter the giveaways? I feel like the usual 6 entries I have every week are getting a little stale.  

And I don't necessarily have to use Rafflecopter. Is there something else out there that you've used?

So tell me, what would you do to win a free book? Leave me a comment! 

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Good luck and be sure to stop back next week!

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The Runaway Midwife

The Runaway Midwife: A Novel by Patricia Harman
ARC, 416 pages
Published: January 31st 2017 by William Morrow Paperbacks

From the USA Today bestselling author of the Hope River series comes a new contemporary midwife novel.

Say “goodbye” to your old life, and “hello” to the life you’ve been waiting for…

Midwife Clara Perry is accustomed to comforting her pregnant patients…calming fathers-to-be as they anxiously await the birth of their children…ensuring the babies she delivers come safely into the world.

But when Clara’s life takes a nosedive, she realizes she hasn’t been tending to her own needs and does something drastic: she runs away and starts over again in a place where no one knows her or the mess she’s left behind in West Virginia. Heading to Sea Gull Island—a tiny, remote Canadian island—Clara is ready for anything. Well, almost. She left her passport back home, and the only way she can enter Canada is by hitching a ride on a snowmobile and illegally crossing the border.

Deciding to reinvent herself, Clara takes a new identity—Sara Livingston, a writer seeking solitude. But there’s no avoiding the outside world. The residents are friendly, and draw “Sara” into their lives and confidences. She volunteers at the local medical clinic, using her midwifery skills, and forms a tentative relationship with a local police officer.

But what will happen if she lets down her guard and reveals the real reason why she left her old life? One lesson soon becomes clear: no matter how far you run, you can never really hide from your past.

My thoughts about The Runaway Midwife ~~

(originally posted February 6, 2017)

(I love to note the first lines of the books I'm reading. First lines can really grab a reader's attention and I love seeing where the author takes the reader after their first lines.)

First line—"Next to the dead man lying on the beach, mostly covered with snow, is a dead swan, its neck twisted at a strange angle."

The Runaway Midwife was a great read, one that I found myself totally wrapped up in. I instantly liked and admired Clara and was rooting for her to succeed. She leaves everything behind when her life falls apart; her best friend committed suicide, her husband cheated on her, and one of her patients dies unexpectedly. She wants to leave that life behind and she flees to Canada. There is no one she can trust and she constantly worries that someone will find out her true identity. She has to learn to be a strong woman or she is never going to survive.

This story was a wonderful page turner and it kept my attention to the end. The writing was superb with a cast of great characters. I'll be on the lookout for future books by this author.

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About the Author

Patricia Harman has spent over thirty years caring for women as a midwife, first as a lay-midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on communal farms in West Virginia, and later as a nurse-midwife in teaching hospitals and in a community hospital birthing center.

She spent over a decade in the sixties and seventies in her wild youth living in rural communes in Washington (Tolstoy Farm), Connecticut (The Committee for Non-Violent Action) and Minnesota (Free Folk). During the Vietnam years, she and her husband, Tom Harman, traveled the country, often hitch-hiking, as they looked for a place to settle. In 1974 they purchased a farm with a group of like-minded friends on top of a ridge in Roane County, West Virginia. Here on the commune, they built log houses, dug a pond, grew and preserved their own food and started the Growing Tree Natural Foods Cooperative.

It was during this time that Patsy attended her first home birth, more or less by accident. "Some people are destined," she has written. "I was staying at a woman friend's commune when she went into labor and I ended up delivering my first baby." Soon after, Harman traveled to Austin, Texas to train with a collective of home-birth midwives. When she returned, she became one of the founding members of The West Virginia Cooperative of Midwives. Her passion for caring for women and babies led her to become an RN as the first step in getting licensed as certified nurse midwife. In 1985, with her children, a yowling cat and her husband she traveled north, pulling a broken down trailer to begin her training at the University of Minnesota where she received her MSN in Nurse-Midwifery.

For the past twenty years, Ms. Harman has been a nurse-midwife on the faculty of The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University and most recently West Virginia University. In 1998 she went into private practice with her husband, Tom, an OB/Gyn, in Morgantown, West Virginia. Here they devoted their lives to caring for women and bringing babies into the world in a gentle way.

When, in 2003, the cost of liability insurance for Obstetrics sky-rocketed from $70,000 a year to $110,000, the Harman's decided to give up deliveries. Though many loyal patients grieved the loss of their favorite mid-wife/physician team, the change in life style gave the author time to begin writing her first book, The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir.

Patricia Harman still lives and works with her husband, Ob/Gyn Thomas Harman, in Morgantown, West Virginia at their clinic, Partners in Women's Health Care. Though she no longer attends births, she provides care for women in early pregnancy and through-out the life span. She brings to this work the same dedication and compassion she brought to obstetrics. ~ Goodreads

Connect with Patricia

Website | Goodreads | Facebook

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