The Midwife of Venice by Roberta Rich

A book review

The Midwife of Venice is an imaginative, suspenseful tale about a sixteenth-century Jewish midwife from Venice's Ghetto Nuovo. Hannah Levi sorely misses her merchant husband, a captive in Malta after mercenaries attack his trading ship. "He had been fond of eating oranges in bed, feeding her sections as they chatted. She had not washed the blanket since Isaac had departed for the Levant to trade spices."

When a Christian nobleman comes to her house by dark of night and begs her to assist his wife, Hannah knows she must turn him down or risk torture for breaking the law. Jewish midwives are forbidden to deliver Christian babies. But the nobleman has heard Hannah is a wonder worker. Indeed, she has a dangerous secret which could get her tortured for witchcraft: "her birthing spoons, two silver ladles hinged together." The spoons can save lives, but they can kill, too. "At a recent confinement, she had exerted too much pressure and had crushed the skull of the baby instead of easing it out." But the nobleman is desperate and will pay her price, a sum high enough to ransom her husband away from the Knights of Malta.

The Midwife of Venice is as breathlessly fast-paced as any thriller. The childbirth scene is as gripping as a tale of battle. Cliffhanger chapter endings bounce readers back and forth between Hannah and her husband as each faces a series of potentially deadly perils. The setting is well researched, although the way Hannah pushes boundaries and encounters one worst-case scenario after the other can stretch credibility. Readers willing to suspend disbelief, though, will find her a swashbuckling midwife in a novel whose pages seem almost to turn themselves. (2011; 329 pages, including a bibliography and a brief Author's Note on the historical background)