Summary and Reviews of Beheld by TaraShea Nesbit

Media Reviews

BookPage Nesbit tells this story of conflict and contradiction in alternating chapters from both the empowered and the powerless. The voices of the women are especially strong, particularly Elizabeth, whose friendships and reminiscences of the colony's earlier days offer insight about the women of the plantation…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.

Minneapolis Star Tribune A richly complex and sorrowful work with a particular interest in the role of women in the colony...In this powerful work, Nesbit renders the past without muting its gravity.

New York Times 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.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) 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.

Booklist 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.

Kirkus Reviews 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.

Library Journal 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.

 Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls TaraShea Nesbit's puritans are passionate and vengeful and entrancing. Part mystery, part love story, beautifully told and meticulously researched, Beheld reanimates and complicates the mythologies of America's earliest settlers. I was sad when it ended.

 Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and The Summer Before the War In a gripping retelling of the Plymouth colony's first murder, we finally hear the voices of women—and they speak an unvarnished truth that turns history on its pointy-hatted head. Truly a riveting read.

 Laird Hunt, author of In the House in the Dark of the Wood Beheld breathes fresh life into a world grown still and murky beneath the scrim of legend—rife with intrigue, fractured by difference, marked by violence, and full of haunting images. With gorgeous, period-inflected prose, Nesbit takes us back to the earliest days of New England to look through the eyes and over the shoulders of historical characters both remembered and not. I read it at a gallop. What a marvel this novel is.

Reader Reviews

Books with similar themes

• Historical Fiction
  
• USA
  
• New England, USA
  
• Mass.
  
• 17th Century or Earlier
  
• Dealing with Loss
  
• Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
  
• Strong Women