Book Review #3 - The Midwife's Confession

I don't even know how to write this without spoilers so consider this your big spoiler alert.

Ugh.

My apologies to Diane Chamberlain, who I'm sure is a nice woman with lots of ideas and talent, but The Midwife's Confession gives fiction a bad name.  I feel rather strongly that fiction has a lot more to offer than escapism or entertainment.  I feel its medium is especially suited to teach - namely empathy and understanding for the multitude of life experiences we'll most likely never have as individuals.  Additionally, I have learned from Tolstoy and Stagner and Steinbeck and Stockett and many others that no matter our color or religion or age or gender, we are all a lot more similar than it seems.  So are our relationships with others.  Toss in some history, geography, or any area of expertise (governing, medicine, cooking, sports, kite flying), a few conflicts for flavor, steady it with good writing and better editing, and, voila, you've got yourself some quality fiction.

What does not make quality fiction is unbelievable, unlikely and ridiculous drama.  Again, those kinds of stories may be entertaining to some but it feels like such a waste of pages and ink to me.  What can possibly be the purpose of reading about three women who meet at college and become BFFs and all live in the same town and all still hang out regularly together (unlikely) until one of them unexpectedly commits suicide?  Is it likely that those who have been adopted relate to becoming a midwife because they happened to be given to the midwife who delivered them (unbelievable)?  Or that they identify with the woman who secretly discovers the names of her birth parents while moving her adoptive mother's furniture because she kept her daughter's birth file in an old swivel chair (unlikely)?   Maybe we can gleem a bit of that universal human condition by reading about about happens when you accidentally drop your newborn baby niece that was just born to your sister who thinks you're really just her old RA from college turned friend  because you were high on prescription drugs that you secretly take due to a back injury from a car accident that happened on the night you slept with your best friend's fiance who you will always love even though he then marries your best friend so you become engaged to his partner but use your old lover as your  attorney to arranges the paperwork for the five surrogate children you deliver to help you atone for the fact that you switched baby girls at the hospital, stealing a baby from a woman in a coma who now has another daughter who needs a bone marrow transplant but now this secret niece of yours who was raised by your secret sister of yours discovers that she is the stolen baby and maybe can save her real sister's life by donating her genetically similar bone marrow?

No?

Like I said - unbelievable, unlikely, ridiculous.  Criminal.  Stupid.