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A Novel
by Ariel Lawhon
Book Reviewed by:From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Hélène comes a gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who investigates a shocking murder that unhinges her small community.
Maine, 1789: The Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice. Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As the local midwife and healer, Martha is good at keeping secrets. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, every murder and debacle that unfolds in the town of Hallowell. In that diary she also documented the details of an alleged rape that occurred four months earlier. Now, one of the men accused of that heinous attack has been found dead in the ice.
While Martha is certain she knows what happened the night of the assault, she suspects that the two crimes are linked, and that there is more to both cases than meets the eye. Over the course of one long, hard winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha's diary lands at the center of the scandal and threatens to tear both her family and her community apart.
In her newest offering, Ariel Lawhon brings to life a brave and compassionate unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice on behalf of those no one else would protect. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story of a remarkable woman who had the courage to take a stand, and in the process wrote herself into American history.
A HANGING
I
November 1789
"Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long."
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE
The body floats downstream. But it is late November, and the Kennebec River is starting to freeze, large chunks of ice swirling and tumbling through the water, collecting in mounds while clear, cold, fingers of ice stretch out from either bank, reaching into the current, grabbing hold of all that passes by. Already weighted down by soaked clothing and heavy leather boots, the dead man bobs in the ebbing current, unseeing eyes staring at the waning crescent moon.
It is a miserable night with bitter wind and numbing frost and the slower the river moves, the quicker it freezes, trapping him in its sluggish grip, as folds of his homespun linen shirt are thrown out like petals of a wilted, brown tulip. Just an hour ago his hair was combed and pulled back, tied with a strip of lace. He'd taken the lace, of course, and it is possible—fate...
Martha's stories of attending births and delivering babies are some of the best scenes, allowing Lawhon to demonstrate her talent for capturing dramatic events while also developing full, well-rounded characters, even when they only appear for a few pages. The Frozen River is Martha Ballard's story, developed down to the finest details in a way that A Midwife's Tale, given its purpose as a work of academic literature and its source's brevity, could not be. For fans of historical fiction, the novel is an excellent path to A Midwife's Tale and other stories, historical or fictional, set in the late 18th century...continued
Full Review
(811 words)
(Reviewed by Maria Katsulos).
Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a PBS special on her life. Along with Ballard, many other midwives – named and unnamed in historical records – made their mark on the colonization of America and on the development of social norms in the new country at the end of the 18th century.
From the very beginning of European colonization of the Americas, midwifery and the safe delivery of infants was a high priority for the colonists: for example, Bridget Lee Fuller ...
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