Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/03/21

The Church, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (Communicating Vessels)

Some things never change, especially when they really should, but different strokes and all that. I’ve never been big into this ’80s-born band, even if The Cure’s Robert Smith stole the dreary, depressing vibe for “Lovesong” from this band’s 1988 tune “Under The Milky Way.” These Aussies have always been a sort of middling punk-influenced rawk band, but despite that, they do try to innovate and otherwise keep things relatively lively. Their last LP, The Hypnogogue, was a concept thing aiming for epicness, which I thankfully don’t have to deal with here. “Pleasure” is pretty uneventful, the same flavor of Lost Boys soundtrack filler they’ve specialized in since the beginning: sparkly guitar, low-end-Bowie vocals, that sort of business. “Song 18” is confounding, a chill-down that nicks Bowie in spaceman mode (yes, there’s a discernible pattern here). They’ll be at Royale in Boston on June 21. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Sam Wilson, Wintertides (Communicating Vessels)

Professed to be a meditation on how landscape and environment inspire her tuneage through her love and empathy for natural places, this is a sparse, gentle release from the jazz guitarist, nestled into a trio setting touching on post-bop. This LP grew organically: In 2020 Wilson made the decision to move out to the rural community of Scotsburn, Nova Scotia. It was a change that would soon prove both trying and isolating as pandemic restrictions came into play — especially once she hit the province’s notoriously grueling winter season. Jen Yakamovich’s drums are smooth and sublime, delivered with a lot of brushed snare; Geordie Hart’s upright bass stretches out now and then for the sake of eerie acoustics. It’s all quite absorbing; the RIYL comparisons here would include Ralph Towner and Michael Hedges. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like every Friday, March 22 will be a day of new album releases, because we love our routines, oh lovely, I get to rant about Tool this week! Yep, look at this, folks, Tool’s singer, Maynard James Keenan, is putting out a new live solo album on Friday, called Cinquanta: A 50th Birthday Celebration For Maynard James Keenan. Cinquanta means “fifty” in Italian. Why did he do that? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s because he turned the big five-oh and there was a celebration concert for it, and plus he posts about tacos a lot on Instagram, no, I’m not kidding, guys. When I turned 50 I quit butts for my vape. I can’t even believe what butts cost now, like 10 dollars a pack, that’s insane. But you know what else is insane is Tool fans, like, if you don’t like that dumb band, their fans shun you like you kicked their dog or something. Talk about a hilariously overrated band, but even worse is Maynard’s other band, A Perfect Circle, which I’d heard was supposed to be one of those cool goth-industrial bands like Collide, but when I tried to listen to one of their albums I was like, “What’s the big deal here,” and never really tried again. I mean, if you like them, all I have to say is “I don’t care!” the same way Tommy Lee Jones did in The Fugitive when Harrison Ford told him he didn’t moider his wife. Get what I’m saying, see, I’ve never heard a Tool song I liked, but I haven’t listened to all their albums, just the ones that aren’t anywhere near as good as any random Pendulum album, so if you like Tool and didn’t moider anyone, we can still be good friends, just don’t try to get me to go to a Tool concert, see, because I won’t go, even if it’s free, which is about the right price for a Tool concert ticket if you ask me.

OK so anyway, back to Taco Man here, and his new live album, do I really have to do this? Yikes, the cover is Maynard wearing a diaper and yelling in a crib, may I go now? OMG this performance is from 2014, and there’s a live version of Tool’s “Sober.” Huh, I always thought that song was by Live. I never liked it, probably because I’m stupid, right, Tool fans?

• All this yelling about Tool, leaves me barely any room to talk about Tigers Blood, the new album from indie-folk fixtures Waxahatchee. If you can picture Alanis doing a cover of a Bonnie Raitt song you’re in the ballpark with the latest single, “Bored,” a strummy, upbeat, listenable tune that I don’t detest in the least.

• Randomly famous Colombian person Shakira has a lot of fans and isn’t as annoying as P!nk, and that’s all I’ve ever really cared to know about all this. Her new album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, is on the way. It has an old-school ’80s technopop beat punctuated with her hiccuppy singing and a millennial whoop chorus. It’s catchy.

• Lastly, it’s the one I’ve been waiting for, the new album from British art-rockers Elbow, Audio Vertigo! The band is led by singer Guy Garvey, a working[-class dude who nowadays is also a radio personality on BBC 6. I first got into them in 2011, when they released the LP Build A Rocket Boys; I’ve lost track of them the last few years, so it was nice to hear their new single, “Balu,” with its Coldplay-informed ’80s-goth-ish vibe. The spidery bass line is super-neat. Big ups to this. —Eric W. Saeger

Mayluna, by Kelley McNeil

Mayluna, by Kelley McNeil (Lake Union Publishing, 399 pages)

It’s tempting to compare Kelley McNeil’s excellent second novel to Daisy Jones and the Six, but Mayluna is more than rock history. Its story revolves around a fictional chart-topping rock group but is more focused on the emotional lives of two main characters: Carter Wills, the eponymous band’s creative force, and Evie Waters, a music journalist who becomes Carter’s lover and muse.

One key Daisy Jones divergence is that Mayluna the band doesn’t easily hew to any other group of the era; they could be Coldplay as easily as Radiohead. Also, and more importantly, it’s a tautly written and engaging story, full of highs, lows, passion and agony, not emotion-flattening oral history.

Carter meets Evie, who writes using a gender-neutral pseudonym, when she attempts to do a backstage interview at Jones Beach Amphitheater. McNeil’s past career in the music industry lends authenticity to Evie’s interactions with the press-averse band’s leader, and to their late ’90s pre-Napster milieu.

Their banter includes business advice from Evie to lean into the band’s mystery, make their reticence a marketing tool. There’s also plenty that could be cut and pasted into the movie version of the novel, which one hopes will come. Their connection is well-crafted by McNeil, but this love won’t last — Mayluna is a look back at what might have been.

In a clever narrative device, Evie tells her story in the present day to her married daughter, who’s returned home for her father’s funeral; he died after a bout with cancer. She stumbles onto a trove of memorabilia in a closet, and in a magazine story about Mayluna spots a bracelet on the arm of someone who looks a lot like her mom.

Evie, who wrote the article as Cameron Leigh, decides it’s time to raise the curtain on her past life.

At the same time, the members of Mayluna are on a private jet, winging to a South America stadium gig, and sharing “the whole story” with another journalist. There’s a sense that their 25-year Rock & Roll Hall of Fame eligibility date is near, and it’s time to come clean. Carter alludes to but never identifies Evie, while the rest of the group drop clues to who she is and what she meant to him — and them.

Carter and Evie’s entanglement is presented as destiny — “There are signs everywhere, Ev,” he tells her. “You just have to pay attention” — and as children they both witnessed the strange celestial phenomena referenced in one of his songs, of a star twinkling through a crescent moon. Evie saw it from her home in Pennsylvania, Carter from the English shore.

So when the relationship abruptly ends a third of the way through the novel, one wonders what will carry the story to its conclusion. McNeil handles it perfectly, giving clarity to the decisions made by Evie while watching Mayluna from a distance, until an unwitting friend’s invitation to see the band at a local football stadium, and a surprise seat upgrade, put Carter and Evie back on a collision course.

The rest of the novel revolves around reconciling, in Evie’s words, having “been gifted with the mating of souls with one man and a lifetime of loving companionship with another,” and eventually realizing that “the one we love most in life may not be the one we love the best.” Mayluna’s greatest strength is the balancing act it achieves between being about a band bound for glory and being about two star-crossed lovers.

It’s to McNeil’s credit that Carter and Evie’s meet-again-cute development doesn’t turn the novel down an easy path; rather, it never stops exploring the hard choices, and often heartbreak, that face both artists and those in their orbit. The drive to create is summarized brilliantly during their initial backstage conversation.

Evie shares with Carter her hope to “write something that isn’t terrible so that I can get the chance to do more interviews with more bands and write even more words and do more films and somehow eke out enough of a living to not worry so much about paying my rent and hope that somewhere along the way, someone will think that the stories I tell matter.”

“So we’re the same, then,” an impressed Carter answers, “That’s us. That’s our band. And our future, all in one sentence.” A-

—Michael Witthaus

Album Reviews 24/03/14

Loreena McKennitt, The Road Back Home (Ume Records)

For most people, hearing the music of this platinum-selling ren-faire folkie evokes thoughts of witch conventions (by the by, we just went to one of those the other week at the Masonic Temple in Manchvegas, and Petunia was selling her witch stuff there); stinky, allergy-triggering incense and homemade “herbal tinctures,” whatever those are. To this day her big hit remains “The Mummer’s Dance,” a lively departure from most of her other fiddle-laden, Celtic Woman-inspired songs, which at least, praise Hepzibah, don’t have much tin whistle in them. This live album features a rendition of “On A Bright May Morning,” a concert-harp-buttressed exercise that’s depressing, lonely and inspirational at the same time, you know the routine. “Mummer” isn’t here, but the violinist gets a right smart workout on “Salvation Contradiction.” “Searching For Lambs” and its bummer cello lines are here too. A —Eric W. Saeger

Devon Thompson, “Poison Me” (Exquisite Feline Records)

Teaser single for an EP that’ll be out this spring from this Los Angeles-based singer, who’s been compared to PJ Harvey and Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. What we’ve heard from her before has been pretty nice, starting with her 2023 debut single, “Soft Like Water,” whose plinky, vintage-themed guitars must have made plenty of Rasputina fans stand up (phlegmatically of course) and take notice. Then came “Napoleon,” which blended Sheryl Crow and both of the aforementioned ’90s-deconstruction princesses in a borderline cowgirl tune rooted in a Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe. With this new borderline-ballad song, she dabbles with a Siouxsie/Florence Welch sound but her tongue-in-cheek sensibilities lead to moments that make you think of B-52s singer Kate Pierson. She has a knack for sweeping epicness, and I think we’ll hear some remarkable stuff from her in future. But this song isn’t it, probably more a testing of the pop waters. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs once sang, watch it now, watch it, watch it — here comes March 15, and it has new albums for you! Here it comes, here it comes, look at ’em all, all these new freakin’ albums, what’s a music journo supposed to do with ’em all, someone tell me! Ack, great, here we go, I suppose I’ll have to pretend I’m not mad at arena-blues hacks The Black Crowes, but that’ll be hard. You see, they’ve been very cheap about sending out review copies of their CDs to us CD reviewers, so we can review them in our CD review columns, and even worse, it’s a pain to get them just to let us stream them, like they guard their stupid songs as if they’re Queen Nefertiti’s priceless collection of bejeweled scarabs instead of a bunch of hackneyed songs that pretty much sound like a Jack White side project. You know, while I’m at it, there’s been a trend lately in which bands do all kinds of stupid things to get reviews, and those things often backfire. Like, if you want me to talk about your album, don’t send the whole thing in an email, that’s Rule No. 1. Every week I have to arrange my emailbox by email size and delete all the multi-megabyte emails from public relations people and whatnot who think I have limitless space on my server, it makes me so mad, guys. That’s not the worst, though. The worst is when I just want to review someone’s album and their PR person sends me a link to some obscure streaming service that wants me to register, which I basically never do, but when I do, the page is a horrible, idiotic mess and I have no idea what to click so I can listen to their music. Whatevs, the new album from whatstheirface is Happiness Bastards, and — wait a second, watch it now, watch it, the whole album is available on YouTube right now, so I guess I have to walk back everything I said. They’re not total cheapskates, let me go listen to one of the songs, “Wanting and Waiting.” It’s very stompy, bluesy, mid-tempo and exceptionally boring, same old stuff, a Baptist choir singing every once in a while and such and so. Let’s move along.

• False teen idol Justin Timberlake parlayed his love for being in a famous boy band into marrying Jessica Biel, sounds like a square deal to me. Of course, before he became a boy-bander he was in the actual, literal Mickey Mouse Club, where he met and started dating fellow Mouseketeer Britney Spears, you know, like normal people do. Oh, whatever, I don’t care about this stuff, and you shouldn’t either, so why don’t I mosey on over to the YouTube and check out JayTee’s new album, Everything I Thought It Was, oh let’s do. Ack, the new song, “Selfish,” is really mellow, with some old, vintage-sounding 808 drum loop holding down da beats for a makeout-sexytime song about something or other, and JT is doing the usual boy band thing, trying to sound like Usher and all that nonsense, may I go now?

• Ha ha, it’s indie-rock whatchamacallits Dandy Warhols, with a new album, Rockmaker! 2024 will see these wanton sellouts commemorating the 20th anniversary of Dig!, the documentary covering their bizarre relationship with acid-dropping loons The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Don’t you feel old now, do you still have your skinny jeans and your Pokemon backpack? The single, “Rockmaker,” has a neat 1950s sock-hop groove to it, but wait, that’s just the beginning, let’s see if it gets bad. Hm, the singer thinks he’s Iggy Pop now, that’s cool. The chorus is OK. It’s not completely worthless.

• Finally it’s Lenny Kravitz, also known as “the ex of ex-Mrs. Jason Momoa,” is this dude really still around? The new LP, Blue Electric Light, features the single “TK421.” It sounds like Living Colour trying to be Men Without Hats. How did this even happen? —Eric W. Saeger

The Women by Kristen Hannah

The Women by Kristen Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 480 pages)

I am not, generally speaking, a lover of historical fiction, but something about the way Kristen Hannah does it is so right: a rich blend of shocking truths, visceral emotions and captivating characters. She did it well with Four Winds and spectacularly with The Nightingale, and she does it again with her latest, The Women.

The Women is set in the era of the Vietnam War. I am not a history buff, which is probably why I don’t veer toward historical fiction often, so I’m not sure if I wasn’t paying attention when being taught about the Vietnam War in school, or if it was just never talked about in a way that made any kind of lasting impression. Or at all. In any case, it was news to me to read that veterans coming home were spit on and shunned, and that the government, for a long time, wasn’t sharing the depth of the devastation that was happening overseas.

Frances McGrath — Frankie — joins the Army as a combat nurse and heads off to war at the age of 21. She’s following in her brother’s footsteps and hopes — naively — to make a place for herself on her dad’s “heroes wall,” which features photographs of all the men in the family who have served their country.

But when she tells her parents that she’s signed up for a tour, they’re horrified.

“‘Take it back. Unvolunteer.’ Mom looked at Dad. She got to her feet slowly. ‘Good Lord, what will we tell people?’”

It wasn’t the future that her parents expected for her, or that society approved of.

“Frankie had been taught to believe that her job was to be a good housewife, to raise well-mannered children and keep a lovely home. In her Catholic high school, they’d spent days learning how to iron buttonholes to perfection, how to precisely fold a napkin, how to set an elegant table.”

Instead, amidst the backdrop of war, Frankie grows up. We watch her lose her innocence as she’s confronted with gruesome injuries and innumerable deaths at work, deplorable living conditions, oppressive weather in the form of heat and monsoons, and a social scene that includes a lot of drinking. She arrives as a young girl who doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and easily turns down propositions from married men. She’s not the same girl when she returns to Coronado.

Hannah splits the book into Frankie’s time at war and the years following her return. Both time periods are bleak for Frankie, for obvious reasons when she’s at war and for some pretty depressing reasons when she comes back home, including that the country seems to have turned on its veterans. On top of that, few people believe that women served in Vietnam. Her parents, whom she so badly wanted to impress, pretend she wasn’t there.

Through it all, fellow Vietnam nurses and “hooch” mates — bunkmates — Barb and Ethel are by Frankie’s side whenever she needs them. They show her the ropes when she arrives, and they show up at her door when she’s spiraling downward at home. The three women come from very different backgrounds, and despite the divergent paths they take when they return to the U.S., they never lose touch. More than once, Barb and Ethel prove to be Frankie’s lifeline. It’s a beautiful friendship, adding bursts of color to an intrinsically dark story.

And, of course, there are men, many of whom vie for Frankie’s attention. Love happens, in complicated and heartbreaking ways. But those are secondary stories, really; there is no doubt that Hannah’s intention is to give a voice to the women who served in Vietnam.

Although this is a work of fiction, Hannah makes it very clear in her author’s note and acknowledgments that she did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people who experienced the war, so I have to believe that most of Frankie’s experiences were not embellished or exaggerated. Hannah also notes that she originally used fictional names of places, but her Vietnam War readers felt strongly about keeping those details accurate, so the settings are all real.

There are a couple of moments toward the end of the book that seem somewhat contrived, but this is a small quibble, and honestly, the whole story might seem contrived if you didn’t know it was based in large part on real experiences.

Hannah superbly blends the heaviness of war with the frailty of humans at their most vulnerable — and often at their best. A

—Meghan Siegler

Album Reviews 24/03/07

Andy Pratt, Trio (Thrift Girl Records)

For 20 years, this jazz bandleader has worked in the Chicago area as a guitarist, vocalist and composer, performing solo and with top local musicians in various configurations. One of his own tunes, “Happiness Is Home,” was a semi-finalist in the 2016 International Songwriting Competition, indicating he’s been around the block many times prior to this LP, in which he fulfills his desire to give his own spin to a variety of classic songs in a straight-ahead jazz setting. Five oldies from the Great American Songbook are here, including a laid-back take on “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me),” which showcases Pratt’s even-tempered, rather pleasant baritone thrumming above barely-plugged guitar lines and a brushed-snare beat, your basic cocktail-lounge ambiance in other words. None of this is hard to listen to, as you’d expect, although Perez Prado’s “Patricia” is something of a curveball instrumental mambo meant to give Pratt the chance to stretch out a bit. A —Eric W. Saeger

T.S.O.L., A-Side Graffiti (Kitten Robot Records)

Believe it or not, this iconic Huntington Beach/Long Beach, California, hardcore-punk band (the acronym stands for “True Sounds of Liberty”) is still around, nearly 50 years after releasing records on — oh forget it, I can’t even count how many record labels have indulged them — and dabbling with such genres as deathrock, art punk, horror punk and hard rock. All told, they’re quite a bit like The Damned, not that anyone reading this who’s well-versed in this band’s history isn’t well aware of it, but just to drive home the point, there’s a hard-rock version of “Sweet Transvestite” (from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) included in this set that’s good for a chuckle. There’s also a semi-serious version of “What a Wonderful World,” its lyrics rewritten to reflect the completely horrible times we live in today. Other than that it’s Vegas-hardcore business as usual, with under-3-minute songs here and there (“Low-Low-Low” is particularly cool). A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

March 8 is a special day of new albums, just like every Friday, and you can’t stop it. Yes, March, my second least-favorite month after February, who’s got the remote, can we fast-forward to beach time, that’d be great. First up this week is a new album from The Libertines, also known as “the Loot Crate version of Kasabian” if you’re a meanie who says mean things. No, actually, they’re OK, don’t flip out, and plus, their frontperson Pete Doherty was dating Amy Winehouse, so at least one person took them seriously. OK OK, I’m trying to be nicer, stop yelling at this newspaper or everyone in the vape shop will wonder why you’re acting crazy, let’s calm down. I know that my words have consequences, so I’m trying to take it down a notch, because yesterday I saw the episode of Loudermilk where the singer whose album he dissed in Rolling Stone tells him to stay out of her life, even though he was trying to apologize for destroying her career. I don’t want to have that happen to me, so I will be nice to this new Babyshambles, um, whatever, Libertines album, which is titled All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade. Wait a minute, folks, the first tune on this album, “Shivers,” is pretty decent indeed, sounding sort of like Elbow. There’s a fractal guitar thingamajig buoying the chorus in fine style, which is something I’d like to see more bands doing, not that they ever take my advice, and so overall I’m pretty impressed. Another tune, “Run Run Run,” is more along the lines of what we’re used to from these guys, sort of like Sex Pistols all sobered up and trying to get on the radio so the straights will listen to them. Not very eventful but it’s OK.

• Wow, thanks, you shouldn’t have, it’s dark-shoegaze pioneers Jesus and Mary Chain, with a new album, called Glasgow Eyes! What a career these fellas have had, racking up Top 40 singles and getting into a brawl with the cast of Riverdance (boy, I wouldn’t want to get kicked in the shins by a Riverdancer, you know?). This new album is only their second in 25 years, the first since 2017’s Damage and Joy, and its teaser single is “Jamcod,” which is purported to combine “dark electronica with some crunching guitars,” let me just go to the YouTube and see about that. Hm, I’m definitely hearing some “dark electronica,” if that’s what people are calling krautrock these days (I just can’t keep up with it all, fam!) and there’s gratuitous noise in there, per their usual recipe, then it goes into some other hard-rocking stuff, and so on and so forth. It’d be nice if the song actually went somewhere and ended up accomplishing something, but these guys hate each other, don’t they? Oops, never mind, the guitarist who used to get in fights with one of the brothers isn’t there anymore. I wonder why.

• Ack, look out, New Hampshire, Judas Priest has a new album coming out Friday! One thing I learned right away when I moved up here from Mass was that you people love the Preeeeest, like, if the New Hampshire state song isn’t “Breakin’ The Law,” I just don’t know! OK, OK, I know, shut up and tell us about this new album, Invincible Shield, here I go, wearing my weatherbeaten reporter’s hat! One song is called “Panic Attack,” in which the synth rips off the weird line from Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and — wait, don’t get mad, Granite Staters, the rest of it is fine, some butt-kickin’ power metal, my butt is totally kicked, and such!

• And finally, it’s famous nepo-baby Norah Jones, with her newest full-length, Visions! “Running” is the single, a laid-back urban-asphalt jam with Echosmith-esque vocal harmonies. As always, it’s cool, darn it all. —Eric W. Saeger

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday, 432 pages)

Ariel Lawhon was in an obstetrician’s waiting room when she came across a story about Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife in Maine who is said to have delivered more than 800 babies without ever losing a mother — a remarkable record for anyone, even more so during that time period.

Lawhon tore out the article from the magazine she was reading and made a note on it: “Would make a GREAT novel!” Fifteen years later, The Frozen River tells that story — three-quarters based on historical record; the rest, as Lawhon describes it, “what could have happened.”

But it isn’t just the story of a midwife, but a true-crime mystery that is deeply New England, though written by a woman who lives in Tennessee.

It begins with the discovery of a body lodged in an iced-over river, “lips parted, eyes still widened in surprise.” After the corpse is pulled out and lugged to a local tavern, Ballard, a self-taught medical practitioner, is called to inspect it. She immediately recognizes the man: Joshua Burgess, implicated in the brutal rape of a pastor’s wife three months earlier. “I had hoped to see Burgess swing at the end of a rope for what he did, but dead is dead, and I’m not sad to hear the news,” Ballard, the narrator of the story, says.

It is clear to her that Burgess, despite where he was found, had not drowned. His injuries indicate hanging, and he is missing several teeth, among other gruesome injuries.

In the 1700s, when this story is set, Maine was not yet a state but part of the Massachusetts frontier. And while there was a judicial system of sorts, and men could be put to death when convicted of rape, such convictions were rare. Further complicating matters, the second person involved in the rape of Rebecca Foster was a judge, Colonel Joseph North, who lorded over official proceedings of the town.

So when Ballard recorded in her diary “Mrs. Foster has sworn a rape on a number of men,” this was a scandal of the highest order: “The people of Hallowell will be chewing on this bone for years.”

Ballard’s diary is central to the story; in fact, it’s the only reason we know about her at all. As recounted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale (later made into a film), Ballard kept concise notes about her life and work from 1785 to her death in 1812. Lawhon draws from the diary to weave her imagined account of how events mentioned in Ballard’s notes played out, using flashbacks to build out her life before the rape, death and trial.

Although Ballard’s assessment of Burgess’s cause of death was accurate, when the case comes before Colonel North, he dismisses it and rules the death an accidental drowning. Immediately after, a girl who works for Rebecca Foster (the woman who was raped) comes before the judge to report fornication, as it has become known that Rebecca is pregnant — the timing of the pregnancy corresponding with the rape. Ballard, who knows the truth, can’t stand for this, and says in the courtroom that the judge is the other man involved in the rape.

This sets up a battle royale between Ballard and North that will ultimately resolve much differently in fiction than it did in real life. It is a protracted battle that involves fear that Ballard’s own son might have been involved in the death of Burgess, and Colonel North using every means at his disposal to try to destroy Ballard and her family, even taking the family’s mill.

Throughout, Lawhon shows us what it was like to be a formerly enslaved person freed in the Massachusetts territory, how women were then treated (Ballard, for example, could not testify about the rape without her husband present in the courtroom) and how disease and death were constant companions to the colonists. (One particularly poignant chapter describes how diphtheria, sometimes called the children’s plague, ran through the Ballards’ Massachusetts home before the couple moved to Hallowell.)

And of course, the weather is practically a character in itself. Although Lawhon compresses the timeline of events for her purposes, the story takes place in what was literally called “the year of the long winter” in Hallowell, as the Kennebec River was ice from November 1785 to the following April. The icy river is an ominous presence from the story’s beginning until its end, as is a silver fox that seems to serve as an omen, as well as a biology lesson — who knew that “silver foxes” are actually black?

Lawhon followed the historical record enough to make the story feel real, but she reveals in an author’s note at the end of the book the major ways in which her story and the truth diverge, and why. Readers signing up for The Frozen River should prepare to make an investment of time, not only for this slow-moving, densely detailed story, but also because they will then want to read A Midwife’s Tale. Those more impatient might want to wait for the inevitable movie. B —Jennifer Graham

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!