After five books spent getting to know the O’Briens, I thought I understood why their family meant so much to me. I loved the way they looked after one another, the way there always seemed to be someone ready to open a door or pull up another chair.
Then I reached The Irish Midwife, and Stacey Reynolds took me back to a time before the family I knew had grown around that table.
Book six is a prequel set in 1978, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It tells the story of a young Sean O’Brien, newly working as a Garda officer in Dublin, and Sorcha Mullen, a midwifery student in Belfast who is determined to follow her calling despite the danger and unrest around her. They come from different parts of Ireland, and falling for each other promises to complicate lives that are already far from simple.
I loved the feeling of going backwards in order to understand more. By this point in the series, Sean and Sorcha had become part of the family’s familiar warmth. Here, they are young people at the beginning of their own story. They cannot know all the lives that will one day be shaped by the choice to love each other. We, as readers, have glimpsed some of them already.
That gave their first meeting an extra tenderness for me.
Sorcha drew me in straight away. She wants to be a midwife, and she refuses to let the fear surrounding her decide what she will do with her life. I admired her determination. Bringing a baby safely into the world is such hopeful work, especially in a place where ordinary days can be interrupted by violence. Yet her strength does not mean opening her heart is easy. Sean comes into her life asking for a closeness that frightens her in a way her work does not.
And Sean, how lovely to meet him before he became the father at the centre of so many O’Brien stories. I enjoyed seeing him as a young man with a job to learn, a family he loves and a future still unwritten. There is something romantic about knowing how deeply two people may come to matter to each other while watching them take those first uncertain steps.
The setting gives their love story real weight. Dublin and Belfast are not interchangeable places in this book, and Sorcha’s life in Belfast is shaped by the conflict around her. I could feel why she would cling to the work she has chosen and why the thought of building a life with Sean might seem both wonderful and impossible.
I won’t pretend a love story can make such a frightening time gentle. What moved me was the thought of two people trying to make room for love while the world around them feels uncertain. A glance, a conversation, the hope of seeing each other again—those small things can become precious when tomorrow cannot be taken for granted.
There is danger in Sean and Sorcha’s story, and I found myself worrying for them even though I had met the family they would become. That is one of the wonderful things a prequel can do. Knowing something of the future doesn’t stop you caring about every step it took to reach it.
The title The Irish Midwife belongs so beautifully to Sorcha. Her work is part of who she is, not simply a detail of the time in which the story is set. I loved that this book let me know her as a young woman with her own dreams, rather than only through the roles she would hold later in life.
Perhaps that is what stayed with me most after I finished. Parents and grandparents can seem, to the generations who follow them, as though they have always known how to be strong. But they had beginnings too. They were once young and uncertain. They took chances, made choices and fell in love without knowing where any of it would lead.
I have spent this series falling in love with the O’Brien family one story at a time. The Irish Midwife let me glimpse the love that helped make that family what it is. After travelling so far with them, going back to meet Sean and Sorcha felt a little like being handed an old family photograph and, at last, hearing the story behind it.
I wasn’t ready to put that photograph away.
Until next time,
Toodle pip,
Lainey.