2025~13. Frozen River

Ariel Lawhon. 2024.

I am less and less a fan of this newly popular genre in which an author selects a person in history about which there is a small amount of historical data and then builds an entirely fictional world around the their life to tell a story.  I really started to notice this trend with The Personal Librarian, which I quite enjoyed.  However, in that case, I knew absolutely nothing about Bella de Costa Greene, who was JP Morgan's personal librarian.  In this case, though, the author writes an entirely fictitous account of Martha Ballard's life.  Ballard was an 18th century American midwife who recorded her life in a personal journal that was published in the 1990s, called A Midwife's Tale.  I read the book in college and it certainly stuck with me all these many years later. 
When I read a 50 Bookish Friends recommendation, I do no research ahead of time. I don't read the book jacket or a summary of the story  I love that when I start the book, I have no idea what I am getting into.  It could be a self-help book, a political memoir, science fiction, or truly anything.  I don't even check to see if it is fiction or non-fiction, although sometimes once I am into it a ways, I do check this much.  In this case, though, as I was reading along, I thought the story sounded really familiar and when her name was used, I was certain that I had read the book before, even though it came out in 2023 and there was no way I had read it that recently. 

Turned out, though, that I did remember Martha Ballard by name and her story, but this book was not her story. I found the fictionalize version completely unbelievable.  I'm not an expert on that era by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the storyline completely implausible.  In many of these highly fictionalized accounts of historical events, I think there has been too much insertion of modern ideas that are more a reflection of our current thinking than of anything that could be consistent with the historical record.  I found this a huge distraction and I just could not get into the story at all~~ in large part because I knew that none of the story was in the diary and that we don’t have any other information about Ballard. The rest of the story was just too convenient, too much like how we wished things could have been for a spirited, intelligent woman.  I probably would have liked it more if she had changed the names and just said that she based it on historical records, including A Midwife's Tale.

Do not recommend.

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