08/22/2026
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A Mighty Girl Pick of the Day: "The Frozen River" by Ariel Lawhon. In 1789 Maine, midwife Martha Ballard is called to examine a man's body pulled from the frozen Kennebec River. She determines he was murdered, but the local doctor dismisses her findings and calls it an accident. Martha knows the dead man was one of two men accused of ra**ng a parson's wife months earlier -- a crime she documented in her diary -- and she suspects the murder and the assault are connected.
The other accused ra**st is the most powerful man in town, the local judge, which means the person responsible for delivering justice is himself the one who should be on trial. As Martha investigates on her own, her diary -- a record of every birth, death, and secret in the community -- becomes both her most powerful weapon and the thing that puts her family in danger.
Lawhon based the novel on the real Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who delivered over a thousand babies without losing a single mother and kept a detailed diary for nearly thirty years, one of the most important primary documents of early American life. While the murder mystery is fictionalized, the r**e case was real, and the novel unflinchingly explores how the legal system failed women in post-Revolutionary America -- and how one woman used the only tool she had, her written record of the truth, to fight back.
Part courtroom drama, part murder mystery, and part portrait of a woman whose courage was centuries ahead of her time, this is a story about what it costs a woman to demand justice when the law itself is designed to silence her. Highly recommended for adult readers.
"The Frozen River" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593312070 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4cyenWD (Amazon)
For the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that inspired this novel, we recommend "A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812" for adult readers at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780679733768 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4tWt5xH (Amazon)
For a Newbery Medal-winning historical novel about another brave midwife fighting for what's right, we recommend "The Midwife's Apprentice" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-midwife-s-apprentice
For a powerful novel about a young woman standing up to witch hysteria and mob mentality in 1687 Connecticut, we recommend "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" for ages 12 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-witch-of-blackbird-pond
And for more historical fiction novels featuring brave and determined girls and women, visit our blog post "60 Mighty Girl Historical Fiction Novels for Tweens and Teens" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=23426
