In The Midwife’s Apprentice, (1996 winner) Karen Cushman took a freezing orphan out of a pile of warm filth to an unloving home to work for food. The girl, Brat, soon got named “the midwife’s apprentice” and found love through a cat she rescued, and called Purr.  The apprentice got a close look at village life in 14^th-century England and when she fled after a failed delivery, went only a few miles down the road and found work for food in an inn. The hardships of hers and the other villager’s lives was sobering. Her choosing a name for herself, re-connecting with an orphan boy she had rescued and returning to the midwife to continue her apprenticeship were uplifting.

The obit for Jamaican-British poet-activist Benjamin Zephaniah, 65, in The Economist (Dec. 16, 2023) ended with: “I used to think nurses were women,/ I used to think police were men,/ I used to think poets were boring,/ Until I became one of them.” Thank you to the unnamed reporter who wrote the touching tribute.
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