The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

The nights are cool, but the days are warm enough to still qualify as summer. So here are two novels to tempt you.

Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon is an historically inspired and riveting novel about Martha Ballard, a smart and hardy woman who, as a real-life midwife and medical professional, delivered nearly a thousand babies around the time of the birth of our nation.  Most of the fictionalized account of this 54-year-old heroine takes place between November of 1789 and April of 1790, though there are occasional flashbacks to 30 years earlier.

The setting is in a town called Hallowell in what is now Maine, decades before Maine separated from Massachusetts.  The Kennebec River is frozen over for snow-swept months at a time. Life is harsh, relieved only by occasional tender moments and loving relationships. Lawhon is a consummate storyteller and word painter. The men are (mostly) hard working, lusty and hard drinking.  The women are brave, industrious, and resilient. Women give birth to as many as a dozen babies, but many little ones do not survive. Life at home is hard work: keeping the fires going, cleaning the privy, preparing meals, raising and killing chickens, making clothes, candles, soap, healing potions, and quilts, and meeting all the other challenges of pioneer life.

Small towns were tight-knit communities, and midwife and healer Martha Ballard kept a journal for 27 years, the inspiration for this work of fiction. Her writing underpins the narrative, but Frozen River is enriched by Lawhon’s creative imagination.  There are rapes, a shocking murder, illegitimate babies, youthful flings, small town gossip and bitchiness, and corruption. At a time when the public judicial system was rudimentary, justice was sometimes achieved by extra-judicial means, not undeserved. This book draws you in from its opening pages and holds you fast as mysteries are revealed. A great read!

In The Overexamined Life of Jacob Hart , debut novelist and retired lawyer Jerry Wald tracks the lives of four men who, individually and sometimes together, search for the meaning of life, death, religion and other profound questions.  Jacob Hart is a successful engineer, a perfectionist, who believes there is an answer to every query, a solution to every problem.  Intense and obsessive, he has weekly nightmares that he can’t overcome, echoing biblical Jacob’s wrestling with an angel, also representing God. When the character Jacob retires from his company (GoldOrbDiversified – G.O.D.), he is upended by the death of his wife, Lizzy, and flees to Colorado, settling at the aptly named Paradise Inn. Even in this idyllic setting, he continues his struggle to understand the crumbling world around him.

He is joined by a rabbi who has concealed from his adoring Minneapolis congregation that 12 years previously, in a family tragedy, he had lost his faith. Together with Jacob, they spend hours questioning why, if there is a higher power, such terrible things could happen to good people.

The powerful CEO of the large corporation for which Jacob had worked has become another friend. In a series of intense conversations, they, too, wrestle with deep issues – meritocracy, white privilege, corporations versus the public good, shareholder return and philanthropy.

The fourth major character is Jacob’s oldest friend, a prominent Ivy League professor, who had beaten up Jacob in the school yard and who had gone on to a position of prominence in academia. The professor is egocentric, a womanizer, and a guy who uses his contacts to play the system. He involves the other three in a scandal involving the corrupt mayor of Chicago.

The philosophical struggles explored could have made this book a tough slog, but they do not.  The discussions evolve organically from some well-drawn characters. Their four intertwining stories, told in the third person, are interspersed with first-person observations by secondary characters. The technique creates a level of tension and intrigue that drives the story forward.

The last part of the book, where all the threads are brought together (no spoiler here) is an often kaleidoscopic and sometimes confusing mash of secondary characters whose involvements in the main story line seem tied up too neatly.  Appropriately, the reader is left to decide whether the larger questions of faith, social justice, intellectual and political honesty have been satisfactorily resolved.  In that, Wald has summed up what, for many, is the dilemma of any search for the meaning of existence.  A richly written, basically effective and surprisingly endearing effort for Wald’s first novel.