When Kate Banner, an American midwife in Nicaragua, loses another patient —a young Nicaraguan woman who had given birth only the night before on the bottom of a swamped wooden boat — she knows it is time to go home. Because to care for the children of war, you have to cut off pieces of your heart. But traveling home leads her to Guatemala, where even children sometimes disappear. Patricia Henley's Hummingbird House is a devastatingly powerful and emotionally trustworthy story of a human heart unbinding itself in the most unjust of worlds.