Alchemy's Daughter

Gr 8 Up—In the summer of 1343, Santina pines away for her tutor, but her father finds him unsuitable and forbids them to marry. Heartbroken, Santina begins visiting the village midwife, an old friend of her late mother's. Santina throws herself into midwifery to distract herself from her lost love and father's demands, but the townspeople—her father included—suspect that she has apprenticed herself to a witch. This suspicion only grows stronger when Santina and the midwife perform an unusual procedure to save the lives of a mother and child at the center of a political scandal. Santina has to follow her own heart and ambitions in order to save herself from an unwanted marriage—and to save those around her from the coming plague. This work includes a good message about remaining strong in one's beliefs, even in the face of 14th-century misogyny. The author clearly did her research, which comes through in expository chunks that can disrupt the flow of the story. Santina's love for her traveling scholar is never far from her mind, and the final reveals of relationships among characters are both unsurprising and unnecessarily convoluted. Overall, this reads like a melodramatic, paler version of Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice (Houghton Harcourt, 1995) for an older audience.