Book Search
I struggled a bit reading my book group’s latest book, The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. It’s about an 18th century midwife based on a real person, Martha Ballard, who encountered a lot of challenging and difficult people and issues in her society. It was a harsh winter, in Maine, 1789, with ice and yes, frozen rivers, and it was somewhat of an uncomfortable read as this winter was so icy cold here. A lot of the book revealed details about Martha’s work as a midwife and a healer. She is delivering babies and there are lots of hardships. Details about the deliveries also affected me as my daughter just recently gave birth. So between the descriptions of freezing cold temperatures and difficult baby deliveries, it was perhaps not the right book for me at the time. But the plot involved a body found in that frozen river and when Martha examined it, it looks like there had been a murder. That certainly held my interest. Now I am sort of book-less. Whenever I finish a book, it takes me...