A richly complex and sorrowful work ... The prominence of female characters provides a refreshing filter through which to see a familiar history ... In this powerful work, Nesbit renders the past without muting its gravity.
Perhaps my being English distorts my reading here, but I see something else at the novel’s core, a critique of Englishness itself. There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly ... For all the novel’s quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone ... The depiction of cruelty is all the more nuanced for being told through the prism of the female characters. They are not weak, but they are powerless, ruled by men and God ... It’s here, in the narration, that the novel finds itself — in the equable plainness of its language, a plainness that is nevertheless impressionistic and light-filled. There are some bright, startled moments in which Nesbit makes something utterly recognizable and mundane, yet also utterly other ... The novel is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot — to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing — that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.
... compelling ... successfully evokes what happens in this society strained by inequality, especially for the women, who are allowed little to no voice in matters of life and death ... Nesbit so persuasively creates her two main female characters, their voices and their fraught partial alliance that the sections focused on one man can seem extraneous ... Despite the novel’s intended tight focus on the immigrant colonists, readers may wish for more understanding of the men and women of the Wampanoag Nation, and how their stories might have broadened the narrative. However, in a thoroughly considered author’s note, Nesbit clearly describes which sources she worked from and how she used the historical record to inspire her fictional account ... it can be fun and illuminating to recognize certain well-known figures from history, and to observe how a skilled novelist such as Nesbit in Beheld disrupts expectation to render the pulsing messy lives of those too often calcified in myth
In Beheld, [Nesbit] is...highlighting differences within seeming homogeneity ... Beheld dissects the back story of the murder: personal histories, secrets and motivations, cultural expectations, rivalries, and taboos. The heat and focus of the story is on the consequences—especially the emotional ones—for the narrators and the community ... The known events are dramatized here; the individuals’ observations and interactions imagined in this well researched—character driven—historical novel. Authentic details contribute to motivation and tension rather than simply helping set the scene ... Nesbit’s empathy is as evident and important here as her commitment to accuracy. She conveys the ever-present threat of loss in seventeenth-century Plymouth ... Reading historical fiction with a balanced combination of accuracy and emotion can approach reading a letter or a diary from the time. Such fiction can also offer intentional, carefully crafted drama and, in Nesbit’s case, beautiful prose.
... a vivid tale, rife with foreboding, of life in a divided colony ... a mishmash of rumination on love and motherhood combined with a suspenseful tale of partisan discontent and personal animosity leading to an inevitable, tragic conclusion. The novel is hampered by a few irrelevant interludes randomly added for social comment (e.g., the rape of a maidservant), and forced, inconsistent attempts at Puritan-speak. These caveats aside, the novel is a gripping read propelled by vibrant characterization, and an engrossing take on the Plymouth colony and America’s first murder.
Restoring women’s voices, primarily through Alice and Eleanor, adds a new and welcome dimension to our history, made more vivid by solid research and clear, concise prose. In Nesbit’s hands, history once again comes alive.
Nesbit continues her contribution to powerful narration of thwarted women ... What makes the story work is Alice and Eleanor’s braided narrative...We see virtue in them, and we feel for them. We want nothing more than for their short seconds of understanding to last longer ... What’s most riveting about this story is the way the women characters self-regulate in the shadow of male authoritarianism ... Alice Bradford and Eleanor Billington reflect communal anxieties that are as present today as ever, and they speak to the human conditions of fear, prejudice, and acceptance. The power of the novel becomes what we learn from our foremothers, what they have to tell us.
Readers who enjoy historical fiction, told with fine literary style, will be delighted. Nesbit undertook considerable historical documentary research to get the details right, and the results should also appeal to anyone with an interest in colonial history.
The voices of the women are especially strong ... Land ownership, religious observation and differing accounts of events all play their part in this clever, insightful novel that digs deeply into our country’s conflicted origins.
Through a delicate reimagining of the lives of these individuals, whose subjectivities have been erased by the annals of history, Nesbit reconstitutes the mythological tale of America’s earliest settlers, creating an affecting story that exposes the hypocrisy and violence of this renowned originary settlement ... Nesbit is less intent on building a compelling mystery than she is in lyrically exposing the hypocrisy of the Puritans’ superiority and their cruelty masquerading as justice ... In stilted and formal language, written in a somewhat successful emulation of the 17th-century vernacular, Nesbit richly renders these female characters’ subjectivities as they endure, and occasionally transgress, the stringent bounds of their society ... Nesbit vividly resuscitates the female experience of Plymouth --- reanimating voices lost in traditional historical accounts while simultaneously showing how these voices were questioned, critiqued, repudiated and ultimately silenced. But she doesn’t accept that they have been truly silenced. They are there if you look for them, in the whispers and traces left by the historical archive, waiting for a little bit of imagination to do its work.
Nesbit cleverly recasts pilgrim history in this deeply enjoyable novel of murder in Plymouth Colony, Mass. ... Capturing the alternating voices of the haves and the have-nots, Nesbit’s lush prose adds texture to stories of the colony’s women, and her deep immersion in primary sources adds complexity to the historical record. Fans of Miriam Toews’s Women Talking will eagerly devour this gripping historical.
Although the pacing here can be off-putting (the buildup to the promised disaster is long; the climax, too short) and the sensitively rendered but still peripheral role that the Wampanoag Tribe plays could have used more development, Nesbit’s novel has all the juicy sex, lies, and violence of a prestige Netflix drama and shines surprising light on the earliest years of America, massive warts and all.
