Reviewed by Mansoor Ahmed for Readers' Favorite

Waiting for the Kick: A Midwife's Grief and Rebirth in Africa by Sheila Kimble-Haas is a memoir that opens in the rawest place possible: the months after the sudden death of the author's husband, Ric, when grief becomes a constant, buzzing presence she can't outrun. Rather than staying home to process her loss the expected way, Sheila joins a humanitarian medical mission in South Sudan, delivering babies in mud-walled clinics under acacia trees, dodging dust storms and civil unrest, and slowly finding her footing among mothers and midwives whose lives look nothing like her own. Organized into three parts, "Running Amok," "Running on Fire," and "Running into Myself," the book traces her journey from a woman hollowed out by loss to someone rebuilt by an unfamiliar country and its people. Readers should know that the book carries its own content warning for depictions of attempted suicide tied to the author's grief, handled as part of her honest reckoning with that period of her life.

Sheila Kimble-Haas writes with a sensory, unflinching honesty, dust settling in her nose, flies landing mid-delivery, that pulls readers straight into South Sudan rather than describing it from a distance. The pacing moves in waves rather than a straight line, mirroring grief itself, with one chapter delivering dark humor, the next dropping into quiet devastation, which keeps the memoir feeling true to how mourning works. The staff and mothers she works alongside, especially Moses and her driver Tut, are drawn with real warmth and specificity rather than as background. The theme running through it all, that healing sometimes requires surrender rather than control, gives the book genuine emotional weight. I found her comparison of grief to the relentless, maddening flies of South Sudan to be a small detail that said more than pages of explanation could. Waiting for the Kick is a beautifully rendered memoir for readers drawn to stories of loss and unlikely rebirth.