In November 1789, midwife and healer Martha Ballard is summoned to find out the reason for dying of a person entombed in Maine’s frozen Kennebec River. Her occupation ensures she is extra conscious than a lot of the intimate lives of her close-knit group of Hallowell. Ballard retains a diary, through which she not solely information births and deaths, but additionally any crimes delivered to her consideration. She had famous the lifeless man’s identify months earlier as one in every of two alleged rapists of a neighborhood lady. Ballard declares the dying a homicide, however when the city’s new doctor disagrees, she decides to analyze alone. From the putting opening scene describing the frozen physique to the thrilling showdown and supply of justice – in a number of kinds – months later, this dramatic narrative powers alongside as certain and robust because the Kennebec itself.
A bestselling creator of historic fiction, Lawhon has all the time taken delight in sticking carefully to truth. The Frozen River is impressed by actual occasions moderately than primarily based on them, making it her first deviation from “biographical fiction”. She alters dates and occasions to go well with her narrative, but Martha Ballard (who delivered greater than 1,000 infants in her profession with out shedding a mom in childbirth) and her diaries had been very actual. It was uncommon for a girl in Ballard’s scenario to be literate, making her many years of record-keeping much more exceptional. Lawhon’s Martha regards her diary as a type of safekeeping, a chronicle of info not emotions: “Reminiscence is a depraved factor that warps and twists. However paper and ink obtain the reality with out emotion, they usually learn it again with out impartiality.”
The imagery is constantly imaginative and period-specific (“the sunshine feels weak and sickly, as if sifted by way of outdated cheesecloth”) and Martha’s character and her relationship along with her group and household make for compelling studying. The analysis underpinning The Frozen River is impressively intensive, although the serving sizes could be massive, similar to passages concerning the ratification of the structure or the workings of the authorized system.
Martha Ballard’s life and legacy are spectacular. She was great-aunt to Clara Barton, founding father of the American Crimson Cross, and great-great-grandmother of one in every of America’s first feminine physicians. By means of fiction, Lawhon celebrates and honours a memorable, and really actual, lady.
