Caleb's Crossing
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15
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Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe's shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb's crossing of cultures. Like the author's beloved narrator Anna, in Year of Wonders, Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha's Vineyard and the intimate spaces of the human heart.
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I had a hard time getting into this one at first, because it was so overtly religious. I know that Brooks is just being true to her 17th-century Puritan character, but it was off-putting at first, along with the ignorance of the time. Pretty soon, though, I was drawn into Bethia's world and had a hard time putting the book down thereafter.
Short Review: I do not read a lot of historical fiction. But much of this was good. It is based on a snippet of reality about the first Native American graduate of Harvard in the 1660s. It is told through the eyes of a woman (starting as a young girl) writing in her Day Book (a journal). I found this particularly interesting because I had a class in grad school reading early Puritan journals, primarily women's. I thought this was a good, but not perfect recreation of a Puritan Day Book. I listened to it on audiobook. So some complaints in other reviews about the language probably slipped by me because I was listening not reading. The basic idea is that the woman in the book meets Caleb (a Native American boy just a bit older than she) as a young teen. They spend a lot of time together learning each others' language and culture. Later, after Caleb's parent die of small pox, he comes to live with her family and learns Greek, Hebrew and Latin from her father (a Pastor and missionary to Native Americans).
There is some tragedy and some romance. I think that the author handles the Puritan theology fairly well and does a good job of dealing with the every day life that is really the heart of many historical fiction novels.
The longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/calebs-crossing/
