As usual, historical novels that explore an unappreciated segment of society proves to be interesting reading. Mid-century New York was filled with immigrants, including women who found themselves with children they could not afford, and no legal way to protect themselves from bearing more children. When Axie Muldoon and her two siblings are sent on the orphan’s train to Illinois, she refuses to stay and returns to New York City. She finds her mother and watches her mother die delivering another child. Axie finds herself apprenticed to a midwife who also provides abortions. Going into business for herself, Axie and her husband find there’s an eager market among the wealthy for birth control and abortions. Of course, not only are abortions against the law but the selling of birth control raises the ire of the law. She is jailed…..but it isn’t the end of how she helps women.

A feminist ode to how women's lives have been tied to their fertility, this story is a dramatic page turner following Axie Muldoon from life as an orphan to life as a female physician/midwife in1800's New York. I couldn't put it down!

Loved this book. Read it in 5 days and it was hard to put down. It's easy to imagine that back in the day this book addressed serious issues that women had to deal with regarding poverty, pregnancy, finances and other issues. I felt for the women. This book was well written.

Well written - couldn't put it down.

This book was fascinating in that it took place in New York City during the Civil War and depicted the war from a new angle. You so seldom read about the immigrants at the time and the poverty. I had heard the term "rag picker" but did not understand what it meant to be one. This is a must read in that it deals with women and how they dealt with pregnancies.

Interesting historical fiction based on the actual life of midwife Madame Restell. Well-written exciting read!

Absolutely loved every page of this book. It kept me riveted .
After reading THE ORPHAN TRAIN, I could understand more about what the young girl was going through.

This is a fantastic historical yarn with plenty of mystery and all about midwives being hounded for providing abortion. Really great read!

As a real life midwife who worked in New York City hospitals for more than two decades and delivered some 1,400 babies, I congratulate and thank author Manning from the bottom of my heart for her beautiful novel, "My Notorious Life." The complexities of being a midwife, as she put it, meaning weighing the patients' needs against the "morality," convention and law of the time, resonated deeply with me. These issues are as timely today as they were more than a century ago. The birth and abortion scenes in the book were vivid. But I am curious why the author did not describe the correct way to deliver a placenta or how the midwife would cleanse her hands before a procedure, since hemorrhage and infection, the most frequent causes of maternal mortality, could often be averted with proper hygiene and delivery of the afterbirth. These are just technical points. I loved the book and will recommend it to all my friends, both midwives and others.

Fabulous rags to riches/midwifery/NYC story set in the 1860s, with a fantastic main character.