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By Jane Smiley

• May 13, 2011

Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, “Caleb’s Crossing,” her fourth in a decade, is a short and seemingly modest historical work — no kings, no famous events — told by an equally modest narrator who does not go on to become acquainted with, say, the infant Benjamin Franklin. Bethia Mayfield’s given name means “servant of Jehovah,” and Bethia means to abide by the rules of her family and her Puritan religious affiliation. But even as she begins writing her confession on precious scraps of scavenged paper, she is transgressing the boundaries her father and older brother consider appropriate for a woman — and they have God’s word on this.

It is 1660. Bethia is part of a community that has broken away from John Winthrop’s colony in Massachusetts Bay and settled on Martha’s Vineyard. Her father is the village “liberal” who doesn’t believe in stealing from or slaughtering the local Indians, but he faces tensions from both sides. Some of the Wampanoag are distrustful, and another influential family, the Aldens, would like to get rid of the indigenous population altogether.

Bethia’s concerns are at first domestic ones: her beloved mother has died in childbirth, leaving Bethia in charge of the baby and the household. Her father is burdened with farm work, with missionary work and with preparing his son, Makepeace, for matriculation on the mainland, at Harvard. Bethia knows she is likely destined for an arranged marriage to a good-natured local fellow, Noah Merry. Given her upbringing, she is not entirely in touch with her feelings, but she does recognize that she is quite fond of an Indian boy she meets and talks to from time to time, Cheeshahteaumauck, the nephew of the most powerful (and suspicious) local pawaaw, or priest-healer. Bethia thinks it may be this friendship, and the Wampanoag rituals she has allowed herself to witness out of curiosity (or what we may call intelligence and a sense of adventure), that has caused God to punish her by killing her mother.

In “Caleb’s Crossing,” Brooks returns to the time period and some of the issues she explored in “Year of Wonders,” a novel that takes place in a 17th-century English town ravaged by the plague, told in the first person by a young servant girl. The setting of this new novel is, however, not an earthly hell but a version of paradise, fertile and beautiful. For most of the narrative, Bethia’s conflicts are internal: how can she teach herself to exist within the narrow confines of the lives women in her world are expected to lead?

The important difference between this novel and “Year of Wonders” is that in “Caleb’s Crossing” Brooks gives her narrator not only a voice but writing tools. What makes this novel utterly believable is Brooks’s mastery of the language Bethia employs in her confessional diary. Bethia’s inner conflict, for example, is clearly expressed by her automatic use of phrases like “already the Lord’s Day is upon us” or “I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God’s plan, not his, nor his father’s nor any man’s.” But she also calls sheep “tegs” and barrels “butts” and the Indians “salvages.” Her archaic usages (“misliked,” “alas”) bring the reader much more fully into her consciousness and her world than the plainer and less well-researched style more common to popular historical novels, where the characters seem to be much like ourselves, although wearing weirder clothes. A serious historical novel like “Caleb’s Crossing” always proposes that consciousness is at least in part a function of language, and that as language changes, so does thought, understanding, identity. The triumph of “Caleb’s Crossing” is that Bethia succeeds as a convincing woman of her time, and also in communicating across centuries of change in circumstance, custom and language. She tells a story that is suspenseful and involving. It is also a story that is tragically recognizable and deeply sad.

We know that the Wampanoag did not retain control of their lands. When Cheeshahteaumauck elects to change his name to Caleb and study English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew with Bethia’s father, it is in some ways a natural choice for him. Like his uncle, he is interested in power, and he understands that the “Coatmen” have powers the Wampanoag do not. But he is a young man, strong and athletic, and he doesn’t foresee the costs of those powers. He only knows that he excels: he’s a much more apt student than Bethia’s brother, and once he gets to Cambridge he takes to his lessons more readily than most of the white students. More important, he allows his different forms of learning to coexist; he observes the monotheistic doctrines of the whites, but thinks he can live outside them, still cognizant of the culture that has shaped him. Brooks depicts Caleb with a light touch; he’s an intelligent boy, but still a boy, as much a rube, in his way, as Bethia.

It comes as no surprise that Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her second novel, “March,” is sublimely proficient at both the details of language and the dynamics of storytelling. Based on the life of Bronson Alcott and, like “Caleb’s Crossing,” a first-person narrative, “March” is a persuasive and moving depiction of both the Civil War and a complicated marriage. Her third novel, “People of the Book,” is a tour de force that dramatizes turning points in the history of an illuminated parchment manuscript as they are manifested in tiny bits of evidence — a trace of salt, a wine stain. Brooks is as adventurous a novelist as she once was a journalist, reporting from the Balkans in the 1990s and writing about the lives of Muslim women in “Nine Parts of Desire.” Her investigative reporting has evolved into exhaustive and meticulous literary research, but her journalistic sense of story has remained vibrant. I can only suppose that years of listening to people talk, of hearing them tell their stories, have given her the same flair Bethia has for eavesdropping on what’s going on around her and learning much more than her companions realize.

Brooks’s intense focus on Bethia doesn’t require that the reader contemplate the larger implications of her narrator’s experience. By the novel’s end, Bethia has attained a measure of freedom and wisdom, the Indian genocide is still in the future and the Puritans’ sense of themselves as the chosen people is still essentially a local inconvenience. Bethia and her family live at the easternmost edge of a continent as yet unconquered. But Brooks, in her luminous and suggestive way, doesn’t seem to mind if the reader infers that all the issues Bethia wonders about have been present in our nation since the very beginning, that they remain today and that an honest depiction of them is a good thing.

“Caleb’s Crossing” could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and insightful ­novelists.

CALEB’S CROSSING

By Geraldine Brooks

306 pp. Viking. $26.95.

Jane Smiley is the author of “Private Life,” “A Good Horse” and many other works of fiction and nonfiction.

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Review: Caleb's Crossing By Geraldine Brooks

Alan Cheuse

Set in the 17th century on Martha's Vineyard, a new novel from Geraldine Brooks tells the tale of a Puritan family — and one daughter's relationship with the son of a Wampanoag chieftain who would become the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.

Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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CALEB'S CROSSING

by Geraldine Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2011

While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of...

The NBA-winning Australian-born, now New England author ( People of the Book , 2008, etc.) moves ever deeper into the American past.

Her fourth novel’s announced subject is the eponymous Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag Indian tribe that inhabits Massachusetts’s Great Harbor (a part of Martha’s Vineyard), and the first Native American who will graduate from Harvard College (in 1665). Even as a boy, Caleb is a paragon of sharp intelligence, proud bearing and manly charm, as we learn from the somewhat breathless testimony of Bethia Mayfield, who grows up in Great Harbor where her father, a compassionate and unprejudiced preacher, oversees friendly relations between white settlers and the placid Wampanoag. The story Bethia unfolds is a compelling one, focused primarily on her own experiences as an indentured servant to a schoolmaster who prepares promising students for Harvard; a tense relationship with her priggish, inflexible elder brother Makepeace; and her emotional bond of friendship with the occasionally distant and suspicious Caleb, who, in this novel’s most serious misstep, isn’t really the subject of his own story. Fascinating period details and a steadily expanding plot, which eventually encompasses King Philip’s War, inevitable tensions between Puritan whites and upwardly mobile “salvages,” as well as the compromises unavoidably ahead for Bethia, help to modulate a narrative voice that sometimes teeters too uncomfortably close to romantic cliché. Both Bethia, whose womanhood precludes her right to seek formal education, and the stoical Caleb are very nearly too good to be true. However, Brooks’ knowledgeable command of the energies and conflicts of the period, and particularly her descriptions of the reverence for learning that animates the little world of Harvard and attracts her characters’ keenest longings, carries a persuasive and quite moving emotional charge.

Pub Date: May 3, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-670-02104-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011

HISTORICAL FICTION

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “ You’ll get only one shot at this ,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “ Don’t botch it .” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “ That form is a deal breaker ,” he tells himself. “ It’s life and death .” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas . She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

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by Heather Morris

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Book Review: ‘Caleb’s Crossing’ by Geraldine Brooks

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Caleb’s Crossing

Geraldine Brooks

Viking: 306 pp., $ 26.95

Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?

Or had they some, but with our Queen, is’t gone?…

Let such as say our sex is void of reason,

Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason.

Anne Bradstreet, “In Honor of That High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth,” 1643

“Caleb’s Crossing” begins with a confession and ends with resignation — with the happy surrender that the Puritans were famous for even though it bore little resemblance to the arrogance the same settlers often showed Native Americans. Bethia Mayfield, the 12-year-old daughter of a young minister, enjoys a 17th century childhood on the beautiful, wild island of Martha’s Vineyard and sees evidence of this arrogance all around her. She’s not allowed to study like her brothers even though she is smarter than the lot of them. She sees how the settlers treat the local Indians, the Wampanoag, and the disdain with which they regard a spirituality older than their own.

Bethia learns everything by eavesdropping — Latin, history, the Wampanoag language. From her mother and a local midwife she learns how to use herbs to heal. On one of her rides around the island on her horse, Speckles, she meets a young Wampanoag boy named Caleb. Caleb teaches her about his world; he shares practical information about the island’s best clam flats and berry patches. With Bethia’s parents and her oafish, overprotective brother, Makepeace, unaware of the friendship, the two grow up side by side, their bond always stronger than any flirtation. Bethia forms her own religion — a braiding of beliefs that is continually tested, reflected upon and improved. In her, Geraldine Brooks has created a multidimensional, inspiring yet unpredictable character. The novel’s title refers to Caleb’s journey from his world into Bethia’s, but it is really a book about both of them.

Then come deaths that place Bethia’s family’s future in jeopardy. Bethia’s grandfather indentures her to a schoolmaster in Cambridge in return for Makepeace’s tuition. The only solace she has is that Caleb and his friend, another Wampanoag named Joel — able students taught by Bethia’s father — will also go. True to the times, her only hope of a dignified life depends upon marriage, but Bethia holds firm through several possibilities. We would expect no less of her.

Brooks has based her novel on several historical facts, including the purchase from the Wampanoag and settling of Martha’s Vineyard by Puritans in the 1640s; the founding of Harvard College in 1636; the building of what was known as the Indian College on he grounds of what is now Harvard Yard in the 1650s (pulled down three decades later); and the graduation from Harvard in 1665 of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, the first Wampanoag student (the second, Tiffany Smalley, graduated this month). The novel is peppered with references to well-known founding fathers in New England — the Winthrops, Eliots, Eatons, Lowells, Danforths and other educators as well as to poet Anne Bradstreet, whose work Bethia reads in secret. Bethia, Brooks writes in her afterword, was entirely made up.

Bethia’s forbearance, her quiet insistence, the way she creates her life using the best of whatever is handed to her, puts the struggles of American women today in perspective. Caleb’s steady focus on the future, on honing the skills that will make him a true advocate for his people, are equally uplifting. But that’s not all. For readers who know and love the islands off the coast of Massachusetts, descriptions of their wild days and their history will create a longing entirely appropriate in May — to go there, to look at that landscape again with a better understanding of the losses and triumphs that have enriched their history.

Salter Reynolds is a Los Angeles writer.

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Geraldine Brooks

Caleb’s Crossing

“CALEB’S CROSSING” could not be more enlightening and involving.  Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and involving novelists.” —JANE SMILEY,  The New York Times Book Review

A richly imagined new novel from the author of the  New York Times bestseller,  People of the Book .Once again, Geraldine Brooks 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, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.

The narrator of  Caleb’s Crossing  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 Brooks’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. Evocative and utterly absorbing,  Caleb’s Crossing further establishes Brooks’s place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.

“Brooks filters the early colonial era through the eyes of a minister’s daughter growing up on the island known today as Martha’s Vineyard…[Bethia’s] voice – rendered by Brooks with exacting attention to the language and rhythm of the seventeenth century – is captivatingly true to her time.” — The New Yorker

“A dazzling act of the imagination. . .Brooks takes the few known facts about the real Caleb, and builds them into a beautifully realized and thoroughly readable tale…this is intimate historical fiction, observing even the most acute sufferings and smallest heroic gestures in the context of major events.” —Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

“In Bethia, Geraldine Brooks has created a multidimensional, inspiring yet unpredictable character…Bethia’s forbearance, her quiet insistence, the way she creates her life using the best of whatever is handed to her, puts the struggles of American women today in perspective.” —Susan Salter Reynolds,  The Los Angeles Times  

“Original and compelling. . .[Brooks’ characters] struggle every waking moment with spiritual questions that are as real and unending as the punishing New England winters.” —Paul Chaat Smith,  The Washington Post

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Caleb’s Crossing

Written by Geraldine Brooks Review by Nanette Donohue

Twelve-year-old Bethia Mayfield was raised in a God-fearing colonial household on what is now Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast. It is a rough existence, and day-to-day living in primitive conditions is often difficult. Her father ministers to the local Native Americans, and though his goal is to convert them to Christianity, he treats them fairly and with dignity. Education is rare in the colonial wilderness, and unheard of for young women, yet Bethia’s natural curiosity leads her to absorb all that she can from her brothers’ lessons.

While on a walk, Bethia encounters a young Wampanoag man whose English name is Caleb. Caleb shares his knowledge of survival in the wild and teaches Bethia his language, while Bethia begins to share the bits of knowledge she has picked up. Both are quick learners, and they soon find themselves friends, despite their vastly different backgrounds. When Caleb’s extraordinary knowledge is “discovered,” he is taken in by the Mayfield family in the hopes of furthering his education—thus beginning a chain of events that lead Caleb, and Bethia, to the fledgling Harvard University.

Very little is known about Caleb, and only one document—a letter, in Latin, to Caleb’s benefactors in England—survives. Brooks has taken the barest scrap of a story and breathed life into it, turning Caleb into a realistic, conflicted young man with drives and desires. Bethia is a fine narrator whose curiosity and innocence provide her with an open mind and a perspective untainted by the bitterness of survival. The settings are vividly described—there were moments when I felt I could smell the tang of salt in the island air or the stench of colonial Cambridge. This is a rich, thought-provoking novel that will stay with readers long after the last page has been turned.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, caleb's crossing.

Geraldine Brooks's latest historical novel, CALEB'S CROSSING, opens with a facsimile of a letter written by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk to the English benefactors who sponsored his education at Harvard University. Written in Latin, faded and nearly indecipherable, the letter nevertheless confers an air of authenticity to a story that might otherwise seem too outlandish to be true.

As if Brooks needs additional historical credentials. In her previous novels, including the beloved YEAR OF WONDERS, she has aptly proven her ability to blend historical accuracy and outstanding research with contemporary perspective and genuine storytelling skills. CALEB'S CROSSING is no exception.

The novel opens in 1660, in Great Harbor (now Edgartown), Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts better known today for its summer cottages and presidential vacations than for its pre-Revolutionary history. But, Brooks reminds us, the Vineyard is as steeped in history as the rest of the United States. Settled by the Wampanoag Native American tribe, Martha's Vineyard is also home --- far more recently --- to a handful of English colonists. Some of them seize on the land's limited potential for farming; others grab onto the potential for whaling. For young Bethia Mayfield's father, the son of a wealthy landowner who operates much of the island like a feudal estate, the attraction is a spiritual one. His mission is to convert the natives to Christianity, a task he's finding more than a little frustrating.

Almost as frustrating to Bethia's father is the task of educating his slow, obdurate son Makepeace. Bethia, who's as sharp as a tack, easily learns history and languages just by overhearing her father's tutoring of her dim-witted older brother, even though she's forbidden to actually learn them herself. She even picks up the notoriously difficult Wampanoag language, a fact she keeps secret from her father but that she uses to her advantage when she meets the compelling Indian boy she re-christens "Caleb." Caleb may be destined to be a powerful prophet and healer for his people, but to Bethia he's also both an enticing Other and a genuine friend. She teaches him English, and he teaches her the lore of the island and a growing skepticism for the absolute rightness of her father's Christian religion. But when smallpox decimates Caleb's tribe, he embraces Bethia's father's teachings as a means to become a different sort of scholar and healer.

After a series of tragedies threatens to destroy Bethia's family, she finds herself accompanying not only Makepeace but also an increasingly scholarly Caleb to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the recently-founded Harvard University pledges to instruct both English and Native young men. What all of them find there is far from what any of them would have expected, and an older, wiser, more sober Bethia eventually comes to reflect on those times with a perspective burnished by loss.

Bethia and Caleb's stories share interesting parallels, particularly when viewed through a contemporary reader's lens. Caleb's maleness trumps his native background, giving him opportunities that Bethia will never see for herself. And, of course, there's the modern-day reader's somber knowledge that the naïve good intentions of people like Reverend Mayfield will result in hundreds of years of bloodshed far beyond the conflicts outlined in Brooks's novel.

As a saga of jealousy, of thwarted passion, of religious difference, of potential never reached, CALEB'S CROSSING tells a universal tale. As an historical novel grounded in a particular time and place, it tells a very specific one --- a story that becomes even more remarkable upon reading in the author's afterword that Harvard is poised, in 2011, to graduate only its second-ever Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag tribe member.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on May 16, 2011

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

• Publication Date: April 24, 2012
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• ISBN-10: 0143121073
• ISBN-13: 9780143121077

Book review: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

• March 6, 2021
• Fleur Morrison
• Book Reviews

Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing tells the story of Caleb Cheeshateaumauk, the first native American to graduate from Harvard College in 1665 through the eyes of his friend Bethia, the daughter of an English minister who educates Caleb.

In a way, it is both Bethia and Caleb who make crossings – Caleb from his traditional lifestyle and Bethia from the confines women faced at the time due to their gender and religion.

The two developed a friendship as children that provided a comfort as they left the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

The story does not tell of uncomplicated triumph for either Caleb or Bethia – the experiences of both were full of ambiguity and complexity. In some ways, their transitions proved successful but each was well aware of what they were leaving behind to make their crossings.

It is clear that a high level of research was behind Brooks’ novel, and an awareness of the beauty and value of culture and tradition for native Americans. It was interesting to read about those traditions, as I had little knowledge of them previously.

This is yet another excellent read by Brooks, whose writing I will continue to seek as it never disappoints.

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Caleb's Crossing : Book summary and reviews of Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

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Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

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Published May 2011 320 pages Genre: Historical Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

Once again, Geraldine Brooks 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, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of Caleb's Crossing 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 Brooks'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. Evocative and utterly absorbing, Caleb's Crossing further establishes Brooks's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.

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"Starred Review. Brooks has an uncanny ability to reconstruct each moment of the history she so thoroughly researched in stunningly lyrical prose, and her characters are to be cherished." - BookList "Brooks brings the 1660s to life with evocative period detail, intriguing characters, and a compelling story... With Harvard expected to graduate a second Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag Indian this year, almost three and a half centuries after Caleb, the novel's publication is particularly timely." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. Brooks offers a lyric and elevated narrative that effectively replicates the language of the era; she takes on the obvious issues of white arrogance, cultural difference, and the debased role of women without settling into jeremiad. The result is sweet and aching. Highly recommended." - Library Journal

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Geraldine Brooks Author Biography

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Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal , where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, "War and Peace." In ...

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Caleb’s Crossing : A Novel

• Geraldine Brooks
• Reviewed by Alice V. Leaderman
• June 1, 2011

An imagined friendship of faith and love draws on the true story of a Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard who became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.

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Book Review: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Genres:   Fiction ,  Literary Pages:  336 Source:   Local Library Amazon  /  Barnes & Noble Goodreads

For our last book club meeting {the one I’m in with my daughters ~ we don’t have an official name other than “book club” pretty original, huh?} we read  Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks.  This is the same Geraldine Brooks who won the Pulitzer Prize for  March  in 2006.   Caleb’s Crossing  is her most latest release, published in 2011.

I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book.

Caleb’s Crossing  takes us on a journey through the life of Bethia Mayfield, a young Puritan girl desperate for an education denied to her because of gender.  As a child she wanders the island of Great Harbor learning its secrets and gleaning every bit of knowledge it can give.  Set in the mid-1600’s Bethia secretly befriends a young native indian of the Wampanoag tribe.  Caleb is the son of the chief while Bethia’s father is the local minister attempting to convert the Wampanoag tribe to Christianity.  While Bethia and Caleb struggle to keep their individual identities they also confront the differences of each other’s beliefs in life, God, and man.  As Bethia yearns for the education denied to her, Caleb actively seeks the “white man education” while suppressing his own upbringing and beliefs.   Many in the community believe the native indians to be savages and unable to grasp the concept of one God, including Bethia’s own brother, Makepeace, who invariably causes problems for Bethia most of her life.  But as Pastor Mayfield teaches the natives it is the natives who teach Bethia.

One of the major themes of  Caleb’s Crossing  is Christianity, spirituality and the acceptance, or lack thereof, of differing belief systems.  Sin and the nature of sin is a primary theme as well ~ after Bethia drinks a potion of the Wampanoag tribe she believes every bad thing that occurs afterward is because of her “sin.”  She truly believes she is going to hell and that God allowed the bad things to happen in order to punish her sinful nature.

Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.

A novel perfect for book clubs with discussions to be had about how far our society has come in accepting and allowing women the same rights as men; i.e. ~ education!  Religion and spirituality are two key discussions ~ which culture was right in their beliefs, the Wampanoag tribe or the Puritans?  And what about the stories the Puritans shared with the natives in an effort to convert them? The stories of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea or Jesus fasting in the wilderness for seven days ~ how much more fantastical would those stories be to someone of a different culture whereas the flip side is the beliefs and stories of the Wampanoag tribe. . .whose to say which was right?

..I thought it all outlandish. But as I rode home that afternoon, it came to me that our story of a burning bush and a parted sea might also seem fabulous, to one not raised up knowing it was true.

A character-driven novel based on the true story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wopanaak tribe from what is now Martha’s Vineyard.  Geraldine Brooks has the ability to transport the reader to the Great Harbor/Martha’s Vineyard of the mid-1600’s with prose that is as engaging as it is profound.  Highly recommended, especially for those who enjoy literary fiction, controversial subjects and historical settings.

Have you read  Caleb’s Crossing ?  Did you find the spiritual aspect of the novel to be engaging or did it turn you off to the book? What about the education theme and the denial of basic rights to women during the early days of colonial America?  All the women in my book club are pretty well educated and the thought of being denied even a basic education outside of cooking and cleaning was enough to get us agitated!

Caleb's Crossing

63 pages • 2 hours read

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Part 1, Chapters 4-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-9

Part 1, Chapters 10-11

Part 2, Chapters 1-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-12

Part 2, Chapters 13-18

Part 2, Chapters 19-23

Part 3, Chapters 1-5

Part 3, Chapters 6-10

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Summary and Study Guide

Caleb’s Crossing (2011) is a historical fiction novel based on the real life figure of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck , the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University in 1665. Born into the Wampanoag tribe on an island near Cape Cod, the historical Cheeshahteaumuck converted to Christianity and attended a preparatory school before enrolling in Harvard.

In her novel, Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks tells a fictionalized version of Caleb’s story in the form of a bildungsroman (or a coming of age narrative ) told through the perspective of Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s daughter in a series of informal journal entries. Bethia’s perspective adds to this story by comparing multiple excluded groups in 17th century New England, including women, Native Americans, and some sects of Puritans.

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Bethia is the daughter of two English settlers in what is now Martha’s Vineyard. They have come from England along with other Puritans to escape religious persecution. Bethia, somewhat disobedient of the rigidly constrained gender roles of her settlement, roams alone in the nearby reaches of the island. There she encounters Cheeshahteaumuck. They exchange knowledge, and even give one another names: she calls him Caleb, one of the followers of Moses; and he calls her Storm Eyes, for the light in her eyes.

Caleb eventually converts to Christianity due to his father’s wishes and actually comes to live in Bethia’s home to study under her father alongside Bethia’s brother, Makepeace, and another Native student, Joel . Bethia, meanwhile, is denied a formal education and assigned laborious domestic duties. Unfortunately, Bethia’s father dies during a sea voyage, leaving his children without sufficient resources. Bethia becomes indentured to Makepeace’s new tutor in Cambridge and her only consolation is that Caleb and Joel attend the same school.

Though Caleb and Joel thrive at the school and then at Harvard, both die around the time of graduation. Makepeace, a lackluster scholar, finds meaning in life. Bethia marries a scholar, Samuel Corlett , and ultimately lives a satisfactory domestic life in the proximity of America’s center of learning. 

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Caleb's Crossing: A Novel Hardcover – May 3, 2011

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• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Viking
• Publication date May 3, 2011
• Dimensions 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0670021040
• ISBN-13 978-0670021048
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking; First Edition (May 3, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670021040
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670021048
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
• #529 in Native American Literature (Books)
• #12,361 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #18,226 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Geraldine brooks.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders, recently optioned by Olivia Coleman. She has also written three works of non-fiction: Nine Parts of Desire, based on her experiences among Muslim women in the mideast, Foreign Correspondence, a memoir about an Australian childhood enriched by penpals around the world and her adult quest to find them, and The Idea of Home:Boyer Lectures 2011. Brooks started out as a reporter in her hometown, Sydney, and went on to cover conflicts as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts with two sons, a horse named Valentine and a dog named Bear.

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