Can I first say that this story is great? Absolutely engrossingly great--especially if you have an interest in midwifery, early American history, or women's experiences in the olden days. And just plain old good storytelling. This has it all.
It's inspired by the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine in the years shortly after the revolutionary war and the establishment of American government. Neither of which is anything to do with the story, but it places it in time for me. Martha gads about doing good--and losing her temper at times--whilst birthing babies and caring for mothers--and gets dragged into a nasty murder when the hanged body of a man is dragged from the river and she's asked to perform a postmortem on it.
I loved her. And I loved the story. But I am so very angry at the author of it. I read her afterword, in hopes she'd apologize for making up a fictional story about a real human being. But she didn't--although she did freely admit her crime. She outlines the known facts of Martha Ballard's life story and she explains a few of her speculations about what might have happened behind the lines of Martha's diary and why she thought them plausible enough to include in the story.
Why, oh why, couldn't she have written a historical fiction "inspired by the life of Martha Ballard" and named her heroine "Jane Fremont", set the story in SomewheresMill, Maine, and came up with unique names for all her people and places? Wouldn't it have been just as good a story? And that would have left the real Martha Ballard's story unsmeared by imagination. Good, loving imagination, to be true. But not the stuff of storybook dreams.
I'd already read the biography of the real Martha Ballard, and this is not her. It feels so wrong to make up stuff about real people.
By the way--Live Oak trees do NOT grow in Maine.
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