Summary: Frozen River

The GIST

Frozen River, published as The Frozen River, is Ariel Lawhon's historical mystery about Martha Ballard, a real midwife and healer who lived on the Kennebec River in Maine and kept a diary through decades when most women could not write at all. Lawhon takes the bare facts that diary preserves, above all Martha's part in a rape case brought against a local judge, and builds around them a murder mystery, a courtroom drama and a portrait of a long marriage. When a man's body is cut from the river ice in the winter of 1789, Martha is the one sent for to say how he died. What she sees, and what she has already written down, pull her into a fight the powerful men of her town would much rather she stayed out of.

The novel has found an enormous audience: a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a nominee for best historical fiction in the Goodreads Choice Awards, and close to two million copies sold. Part of its pull is the history. The real Martha delivered more than eight hundred babies without ever losing a mother in childbirth, a record that would not become normal in America until well into the twentieth century, and she would be almost unknown today but for her own pen. Lawhon is careful to say the book is inspired by real events and is not a strict retelling of them. What she adds is a voice: sharp, tender, stubborn and very hard to forget.

The Story

The place is Hallowell, Maine, a river town on the Kennebec, a few years after the American Revolution. The country has a new Constitution but no Bill of Rights yet. Dollars and British pounds change hands side by side. The local courts are young and uncertain, and whoever has money has power. Women live under the legal authority of fathers and husbands; a married woman cannot even give evidence in court unless her husband is at her side. The law of the time comes down hard on women in other ways as well. An unmarried mother can expect a heavy fine, the whole burden of the child and a lasting stain, while the father usually walks away. Rape is the exception, a hanging crime, and for that very reason almost impossible to prove.

Into this world steps Martha Ballard, in her fifties, mother of a large family and midwife to the whole district. She rides out on horseback through winter nights to deliver babies, and she is far more than a midwife: nurse, pharmacist and physician to her neighbors in all but title. She tends the women who are kind to her and the women who are not. Every year she sews a quilt for some bride who will be denied the usual celebrations because her wedding came in a hurry. And each day she writes a few lines in her diary: the weather, who gave birth, who was sick, who came and went. She can do this because her husband taught her to read and write.

That husband is Ephraim Ballard, who owns the mill, and he is the book's quiet marvel. He quotes Shakespeare to his wife, backs her calling, stands beside her when she goes looking for justice, and in one much-loved scene washes her and brushes out her hair after a punishing stretch of work. Their marriage, some thirty-five years old, is a partnership of equals in an age that did not expect one. Around them is a full house. Cyrus, the eldest, cannot speak. Jonathan works the river, moving boards downstream. Hannah and Dolly are of an age to be courted, and Young Ephraim is still a boy. A married daughter, Lucy, lives across the water.

The story begins as the Kennebec is freezing over. A man is found locked in the ice, and Martha is called to examine the corpse. He is identified as Joshua Burgess, and the marks on him suggest he did not simply drown. To Martha's eye he has been killed, and his body looks like that of a man who was hanged. Her opinion is not welcome to everyone. A newly arrived physician, Dr. Benjamin Page, represents the kind of trained male authority that is ready to brush a midwife's judgment aside.

Burgess is no stranger to scandal. Months earlier Rebecca Foster, the wife of the town's recently dismissed minister, Isaac Foster, confided in Martha that two men had forced their way in and raped her. One was Burgess. The other was Joseph North, the town's judge, the very man who sits over Hallowell's legal affairs. Martha saw Rebecca soon after the attack and saw the injuries for herself, which makes her the most important witness Rebecca has. Rebecca is also now carrying a child conceived in that assault.

So two cases wind around each other through the frozen months. In one, Rebecca's accusation must make its way through courts run by North's friends and peers, and North does everything in his power to stop Martha from ever testifying. In the other, someone has killed Joshua Burgess, and suspicion falls quickly on the Fosters. A young woman who helps in their house, and who is also the town gossip, overheard Rebecca say she wished her husband had been the one to kill the man. She reports the remark as if it were a confession. The disgraced minister had every reason to want Burgess dead.

Martha is determined to see right done on both counts, and she has one weapon nobody thought to take from her. Day after day she has written down what happened in Hallowell, and those entries hold details that can be set against the stories people tell. Between deliveries, and there are many, each one a small drama of its own, she gathers what she knows and begins to piece the truth together. The book is full of the town's people: the tavern-keeping Pollards, whose son is courting Hannah; an officer of the court with his eye on Dolly; the storekeeper; the judges of the Court of General Sessions; unwed mothers, frightened first-time mothers, and a traveling Black woman healer known simply as Doctor.

Lawhon also steps back in time. In chapters set years earlier, we learn how Martha and Ephraim came together, how they ended up on the Kennebec, the unexpected road by which she became a midwife, and the births of her own nine children. One chapter, on the season in which she buried three of her daughters, is among the most painful in the book.

The river gives the novel its shape. It opens as the ice closes over the Kennebec and ends as the ice breaks up in spring, and it begins and ends with a birth. How the murder is solved and what becomes of Rebecca's case are for the reader to discover. Reviewers promise only that the suspense builds to a real surprise, and that nobody leaves the book carrying the full weight of injustice.

What It's Really About

Above all this is a book about whose word counts. Martha knows more about the private life of Hallowell than any magistrate, because she is the one in the room when its children are born. Yet her knowledge has standing in court only on men's terms, and a judge accused of a capital crime can use his office to shield himself. Lawhon has said she wanted to explore what happens to a community when its people cannot agree on whether a rape took place. The novel is a sharp look at the prejudices built into the young country's institutions, and at how far a determined woman could push against them with nothing but her reputation and her record.

It is also a hymn to the written word. Martha's diary is the reason her story did not vanish. In the novel it becomes evidence; in life it carried her name down two centuries. Lawhon writes in the present tense to make that distant winter feel as if it were happening before our eyes.

Motherhood runs through every chapter: bringing children into the world, raising a son who is treated as damaged, watching grown children choose their own lives, burying the ones who die. Early on Martha says, "Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other." The book treats birth with wonder. Martha marvels at the patients who make labor look like what she believes it is at bottom, something right and natural. It is equally honest about the women for whom pregnancy arrives through violence or shame, and about a midwife's duty to protect every life in front of her.

And it is a love story about a long marriage. Lawhon said she wanted to show what a couple looks like thirty-five years after making the right choice, with decades of joy and grief behind them. Many readers confess that Ephraim is the character they fell for.

Lawhon first came across Martha Ballard at her own doctor's office, some fifteen years before the novel appeared, and wrote the book at home during the pandemic with four children around her, working, as she notes, in the middle of family life just as Martha did. Her hope, stated in her note at the end, is that readers will be astonished by this life, and will remember that "small acts, done in love, matter every bit as much as the ones that make the newspaper and the history books." Do save that note for last; it explains what is fact and what is imagined, and it gives things away.

Who Should Read It

Readers who love historical fiction with a mystery at its center and a formidable woman telling it will be swept up at once, as will anyone curious about midwifery, early American life or the long history of women seeking justice. It is a fine choice for book clubs. Be aware that the plot turns on a rape, which is discussed often and described, and that a second attempted assault occurs; some will find those passages hard. For everyone else, this is a fast, absorbing, deeply felt novel about a life that deserved to be remembered.