Caleb’s Crossing - Geraldine Brooks Audiobook

Written by Geraldine Brooks
Read by Jennifer Ehle
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: May 3, 2011
Duration: 12:07:03
Pulitzer Prizewinner Brooks (for March) delivers a splendid historical inspired by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauck,

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.

Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, is restless and curious. She yearns for 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 the age of 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’ 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’ place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.

The period detail and the compelling viewpoint of Bethia Mayfield are strengthened by Jennifer Ehle’s narration. Ehle’s emphasis on the seventeenth-century word choices and grammatical structure creates a lyrical presentation. Equally strong is the portrait she draws of Bethia, a young woman who, like Caleb, has a strong intelligence and is as challenged by gender bias as he is by racial prejudice. Ehle captures the heroine’s passion for learning as well as her indignation and resignation in the face of unfair treatment–her own and that of her admired childhood friend, Caleb. The combination of Brooks’s writing and Ehle’s narration creates a powerful rendition of what Bethia calls her “tragical lament.” S.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine