I’m going to be honest here and say that I’m not a major fan of police procedural type books, movies or tv but I’ll always make an exception when several someones tell me I need to pay attention to something and that’s why I decided to read Whispers In The Dark. People on my Twitter feed would not shut up about it and now that I’ve read it I can understand the positive buzz.

Rose is a sniper with a painful past and when the book begins she is in a standoff with an irrational man. The scene is intense and shows Rose is calm, cool and knows what she’s doing but this event is more than it seems. Rose is also more than she seems and soon after finds herself and her family embroiled in a battle for their lives. The stakes are high and the revelations are chilling. You’ll have to read the book to discover them though because I am not a spoiler of books.

The best thing about this story, besides the history and the creep-factor and the ever-lurking dread, were the characters and their very complicated relationships with each other. They’re flawed, realistic, relatable - all of those things, and I really enjoyed reading their stories and reactions to events. Life is often messy, imperfect, frustrating, and disappointing and this book felt real to me because of the character’s interactions with each other and the realism and emotion written into the scenes. I still find it difficult to believe this novel was a debut. That sort of blows my mind.

I’m glad I listened to my horror people and gave this book a chance. I can easily recommend it to anyone looking to escape reality for a while and fall into a tension-filled novel with unforgettable characters.

This is an interesting history/biography that’s both accessible and scholarly. Ulrich uses the bare-bones journal of a midwife in early New England, kept from age about 50 through her late 70s, to illuminate the social history of early Maine, as well as Martha Ballard’s own life and family drama. Ulrich clearly digs deep, cross-referencing many sources including official documents and other diarists from the area. The result is surprisingly rich, and includes some major events (a backwoods rebellion, a mass murder) as well as the details of Ballard’s life (visiting neighbors, gardening, delivering babies, marrying off her daughters and left in old age unhappily relying upon her son). Some of the information is surprising or illuminating: for instance, that 40% of first babies were conceived out of wedlock (overwhelmingly the parents soon married, however). Some of it seems fairly obvious now, though perhaps less so 30 years ago when this book was published: for instance, the fact that the women of Ballard’s small farming community had independent social and economic lives, typically visiting separately from their husbands and carrying on their own small-scale transactions with their neighbors. Meanwhile, Ballard had an eventful career in midwifery, often rushing from one home to another when multiple women were in labor at once, walking across frozen rivers or canoeing across partially-frozen ones to reach her patients. Ulrich presents her as part of a complicated network of “social medicine,” which ranged from neighbor women who showed up to assist at births or sit with the sick, through midwives who also acted as doctors, nurses, apothecaries and morticians depending on the situation, up through physicians, who were only beginning to monopolize the practice of medicine. In Ballard's lifetime doctors and midwives seem to have worked together mostly harmoniously – she witnessed several autopsies at the doctors’ invitation – though they sometimes butted heads. I would have liked to see a little more analysis of the medical techniques Ballard used. She was pretty clearly a practitioner of traditional rather than experimental medicine, but she also had a fantastic success rate for the time, losing only 5 mothers out of 1000 births. (Contrast with hospitals in London and Dublin, which had far higher maternal death rates, one as high as 1 in 5.) Ulrich mostly dismisses this with the notion that birth is a natural rather than a medical event, over-dramatized in fiction (though, 1 in 24 of the babies Ballard delivered were dead at birth or soon after). But what could those hospitals have been doing so badly wrong? Perhaps New England's colder climate and sparser population, making the spread of disease more difficult, was a major factor here? Overall Ulrich is more focused on the role of women in medicine than the effectiveness of the medicine, but I don’t think discussion of the latter would have undermined the impressiveness of the former at all. Yes, Ballard’s treatments included things like putting onions on people’s feet, but this was a time period when the most celebrated treatment promoted by the male medical establishment was bloodletting, which goes beyond just ineffective to be actually harmful. Overall, I would definitely recommend this to those who are interested as a strong piece of original scholarship that’s also quite interesting and accessible to those who enjoy popular history. Ulrich’s ability to draw meaning out of what might first appear to be a dry and abbreviated record is nothing short of impressive.

A love like Fitz and Cadence has proves itself to be bigger than these two mere mortals.  Willink gives breathless it's own zip code with Cadence Duet.  She put her heart in each line and dragged my soul along for the ride. Webber and Laurel add emotion to a melody that gives voice to beauty as heartaching as it is inspiring. Young love takes on adult life and finds self- discovery along the way.  Willink hit all the right notes.

Fairy tales must be hard to write: so few people ever manage to produce a good one. There are many retellings, of course, particularly popular in YA, but few new ones. Snyder does an excellent job of getting the tone right: close enough to respect the conventions, but with enough of modern sensibility to avoid sounding fake. So sure, there's some magical transportation to keep things moving, but a realistic evaluation of the boredom and discomfort of travel.

There's some mystery, some menace, inflexible tradition, and motherless kids setting off for adventure. There is some silliness, but the children are taken seriously for their concerns and needs and desires.

Charming and a little corny, but never smarmy. Not too scary for preschoolers, but better for the 5 and ups.

The art is charming, but not accurate to the text, so it doesn't enhance the experience. I don't expect video adaptations to be exactly like the source material, but I do feel like the illustrations shouldn't be at odds with text in a picture book. Nothing huge, it's just clear that the artist wasn't working from the final text.

Library copy