Catherine, Called Birdy shares a host of attributes with The Midwife's Apprentice, so many that the second novel stands almost in the same relation to the first as do the two halves of a diptych: together they make up an entire world. Catherine, Called Birdy is the first-person diary account of a highborn thirteen-year-old girl of diminished means struggling to impose her will on the world around her of England in 1290-1291. The Midwife's Apprentice is the third-person story of a lowborn and impoverished thirteenyear-old girl who is trying to survive in the England of about 1300. The two novels touch on the high, the low, and almost all that lies between in this portion of the Middle Ages.

Catherine, headstrong and willful, starts keeping a journal at the behest of her brother Edward, who hopes this penitential discipline will make her grow less childish and more...