Reading.is.your.destiny

🎧❄️PUB DAY REVIEW❄️🎧

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🫶Thank you so much to @prhaudio and @librofm for the gifted audiobook 🎧

👏WOWOWOWOW! A round of applause for Martha Ballard!

🤱Martha Ballard was a midwife who kept a diary with thousands of entries during the late 1700s and early 1800s. These entries tell of the 816 babies she delivered over a 27 year period. THE FROZEN RIVER is fiction based on her life and experiences.

⏲️This book is LONG (15hr audio and 448 pages) and sometimes GRUESOME but wow, was it a great story! I learned so much while reading this!

My thoughts while reading this book:

💭Ooo, what a nice little mystery this is going to be!
💭I wonder how much of this is true?
💭Googling Martha Ballard obsessively…
💭WAIT! WHAT DID SHE JUST DO???? *JAW HITS THE FLOOR*
💭Adds to audiobook favs shelf

🗣️I could talk about this book for days, there’s so much here. I wish I would have read it with a bookclub so I could discuss!

🤱I instantly put A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on hold at the library because I need to read her diary entries and learn more about this woman!

🎧I also need to take a minute to talk about how astonishing the audio performance was by Jane Oppenheimer. Truly a spectacular and heartfelt reading. Jane made this story COME ALIVE!

“I am a midwife, I am a healer. I do not take life, I shepherd life into this world.”

⚠️Content warnings: This is about childbirth in the 1700s sooo it’s not always pretty. Some pretty graphic yet realistic scenes. DM me if you have concerns.

❓Is there someone in history you’d love to learn more about?