andintothetrees 's review for:

Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

4.0

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The third and final installment in the Call The Midwife trilogy returns to tales from Jennifer Worth's nursing and midwifery career, and as with the first book in the series, I struggled to put it down. The situations depicted here are generally less light-hearted than in the first book (including families wiped out by tuberculosis, women forced into sex work and backstreet abortions), and thus the overall tone is rather less joyful, but it's still very readable (and there are some cheerful tales too). Once again I have some reservations about the degree to which the stories here are embellished - you expect some embellishment when reading a memoir but in this instance many of the incidents are not only retellings from the author's memory but retellings from other's memories - but perhaps that doesn't matter too much as long as the overall point is made. I enjoyed the final chapter a lot too, which updated us on what the nurses and nuns mentioned in the book were doing by the early 2000s, it provided a good feeling of closure to the series. I believe Jennifer Worth also wrote a 4th, standalone book, about her non-midwifery nursing experiences, and I intend to read that too - she's got me very interested in social history and the history of medicine!