Catching Babies by Sheena Byrom - anyone else found this book really badly written?!

[libbyssister]

Have just trudged through this book and put up with chapter after chapter of 'snippets' - here's a snippet about births in Blackburn's Indian community; here's a snippet about births to women with drug problems; here's a snippet about my next promotion and the one after that and the one after that; here's a snippet about my tea at no. 10. Blah blah blah
All a couple of pages long, no real depth, just a string of anecdotes. And 98% of them positive with positive outcomes - didn't the 'author' ever have a bad day?

And after all that, it says in the acknowledgments that it's ghost written! WTF? I was willing to allow the 'author' the fact that she was a midwife and not a writer. But now it like I wasted my time with a ghost writer who must have just transcribed the tapes from their interviews verbatim.

Sheeeesh. Ok rant over...

[Mirage]

I was disappointed too.She was interviewed on Woman's Hour and they raved about the book,but I thought it was quite dull.

[sagefemme55]

Hi libbysister Sheena Byrom here,

I am so sorry that you didn't enjoy Catching Babies. The 'snippets' you describe were small snapshots of a variety of things that happened to me...to add more detail for each of my experiences would've made the book too large (there was a word limit)...but believe me there was lots of 'real' depth.

And there were many bad days/weeks/months described in the book. For example, my sister tragically died very young, I was bullied, and I was the centre of a huge litigation case. Perhaps you missed them as you 'trudged through'......

And yes, the wonderful Charlotte Ward was the ghostwriter for my story...but no transcriptions, no tapes....it's much more detailed than that. The words and the life time stories of helping women are mine. Charlotte turned them magically into a more readable format.

But I am new to this, and whilst it was a little hard reading your comments I have to learn that although I could almost always please those I cared for during my work, it's not the same with writing books! On the positive side feedback from readers has been overwhelmingly brilliant, and even though I was nervous that no one would be interested in Catching Babies, there have been more than 38,000 copies sold since November. So it can't be that bad!

Best wishes...

[theonewiththenoisychild]

I brought this today. Its on my to read pile but got a lot to get through at the moment seem to buy a new book or 3 every week at the moment