A Kiss for Midwinter

A Kiss for Midwinter (2012) Courtney Milan

Set in England in 1863.

Jonas Grantham is a doctor–it has been his dream. And once he became a doctor, he vowed never to allow anyone to act against his principles as he did when a doctor he was following all but attempted to murder the pregnant young girl he was seeing.

Miss Lydia Charingford has been ruined. But thanks to her best friend Minnie, no one knows about her ruin except Minnie, her family, and the doctors who saw her.

Unfortunately, one of those doctors was Jonas Grantham who has returned after medical school to take up his practice.

Safe to say that she wouldn’t tell her father that Grantham was instructing her on the use of French letters. He might take that amiss.

One of the things I particularly like about Grantham is how blunt he is, but that he’s blunt because he cares.

Her skin turned white. That meant the capillaries in her skin were constricting. He could almost have guessed her pulse from the labor of her breath. She’d be feeling cold and light-headed right about now.

“Breathe deeply,” he suggested.

Carrying a child was hard on a woman’s body, and eight children, delivered ten months after one another, left a woman no room to recover.

Every time he tried to make the argument, though, he found that women disliked being compared to mares and fields, no matter how apt the analogy was.

As for the men—a fallow field, apparently, said nothing about a man’s virility. But a wife who bore child after child formed a living, walking boast, one that he could parade in front of his compatriots. Look at me! I’m a man!

“The stuff that babes are made of comes from your own body, Mrs. Hall.” He straightened and put away his stethoscope. “If the babe needs the material of bones, it comes from you. If it needs the material of skin, it comes from you. There’s a reason you’re losing your teeth, Mrs. Hall.” She looked away. “You need to take a rest from bearing children. This babe likely won’t kill you. The next one might.”

This actually comes up in The Countess Conspiracy, although not in as much detail. And it’s one of the reason I liked this book so much–it’s a blunt reminder of how life really was.
Rating: 8.5/10

Published by Courtney Milan

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