Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

This is one of Brooks’ lesser novels I think. It’s still very much worth reading but I wonder if it’s as Theo said, that she’d signed the book deal but when she did the research discovered there wasn’t enough story to support the novel. It’s based on fact, as her work is always, the true story of a couple of American Indians in the earliest days of the colony who are sent off to study at the six year old Harvard College.

She invents a ficitional heroine to hold the story together, Bethia, and it’s her relationship with the Indians that brings the story together. There’s some interesting insight into what it was like being young woman and living I a brand new Puritan colony at the time but essentially the whole thing is pretty thin . the problem is that little is known of Caleb the Indian other than that he went to college. So she’s had to develop a fantastical relationship with Bethia, and add elements of conflict like the pull to Indian traditional religion and magic and so forth.

So I found it unsatisfying but only through the prism of her other work, her magnificent ‘March’ for example.