The Midwife's Apprentice

A homeless, nameless girl sleeping in a dung heap for warmth is taken in by Jane Sharp, the local midwife in an unnamed medieval English village, who feeds her in exchange for labor and calls her Beetle since she has no name of her own to offer. Jane teaches her almost nothing directly about midwifery, keeping the actual skill close and doling out only chores, but Beetle watches and absorbs the work anyway, picking up herbs, timing, and the practical craft of delivering babies through sheer close observation. After being mistaken for someone named Alyce, she decides she likes the sound of it and claims it as her own name, a small act of self invention that runs through the rest of the book.

Alyce gets her first real chance to prove herself when she delivers a baby for the manor's lady on her own and is rewarded with real gratitude and payment, but a second, much harder birth overwhelms her, and she panics and runs, ashamed of failing when it mattered most. She takes work at an inn instead, where an Oxford scholar staying there teaches her to read, and when a pregnant woman in the village needs help, Alyce steps back in and delivers the baby successfully, rebuilding the nerve the earlier failure cost her. She returns to Jane's door asking to be taken back as an apprentice and promising she will keep asking until Jane says yes, and the novel ends on Jane's silence, which the book makes clear is really consent.

Cushman writes the medieval setting in vivid, unglamorous, often smelly detail, cold, mud, and real physical labor rather than any storybook version of the past, and the short novel moves quickly toward a heroine readers tend to remember for her sheer persistence rather than any single dramatic scene.