By Paul Carrier
The world of the Pilgrims, who founded Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts, has been explored in countless books over the years, fictional and factual, adult-oriented and child-centered.
Now TaraShea Nesbit makes a memorable contribution of her own with Beheld, a novel set in Plymouth a decade after the colony’s founding in 1620.
Nesbit's book serves two especially valuable purposes. For one thing, she gives voice to seldom-heard female settlers in the male-centric colony.
And she attacks the myth of Pilgrim homogeneity by suggesting that there were bitter conflicts among the colonists between religious separatists and traditional Anglicans, powerful elites and embittered indentured servants, the favored and the reviled.
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