Geraldine Brooks has a way with history, making it a powerful force in her fiction.

After her luminous Pulitzer-Prize-winning March, she in on that list of authors I will always read. March told the “lost” story of Little Women: the father who went into the Civil War as a pacifist minister and abolitionist and came back home (in Alcott’s words) “haunted.” Brook’s People of the Book was about a haggadah, an ancient Jewish holy book, and its extravagant history. These books (I haven’t read her first yet) give a strong sense of an author who loves to do the research, turning it into enjoyable fiction, passing her passion on to the reader.

That being said, I don’t feel Brooks has yet returned to the same ethically complex and emotional charged high ground that won her the Pulitzer for March. That book was not only historically fascinating (though even Brooks admits she sometimes fudged with history to make a good read). March also asked a question about moral absolutes and their price, and it told a heartfelt tale of belief and its price, of nobility with its attendant victories and failures.

Caleb’s Crossing is about the first Native American who graduated from Harvard. We forget that Harvard is older than America. That scholar was Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, from the Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard (before it was Martha’s). He graduated in 1665. Very little is known of Caleb’s life, but that’s where Brooks steps in, filling in the gaps, creating a rich history.

That being said, this is also where Brooks makes a misstep for me. The narrator of the story is Bethia, a local Vineyard girl whose minister father is trying to bring Puritanism and Christianity to the Wampanoag. The minister, who also teaches, is a primary reason Caleb goes to Harvard, according to Brooks. The Native American is given an opportunity of learning that Bethia isn’t. Bathia has to sneak around, eavesdropping and memorizing her father’s lessons to her loutish brother. She secrets books. She silently rails against the bigotry and sexism of her era and her family’s religious beliefs. Bethia is stuck, so embroiled in the dogma even she doesn’t realize how squelched her natural affinity for learning is. She steals away papers, writing this lost history.

OK, so I get it. I get that the sexism that Bethia suffers is a lot like the discrimination Caleb and his tribe suffers. Caleb tries to bridge the two worlds; he’s given more opportunity, but it’s a position that forces him to face racism and to hide many of his own natural beliefs that Brooks strongly hints may be better than the Puritan ones. Bethia is the same. The problem is that this is an overused structure, or at least an obvious one. We know Americans (and pre-Americans) have a long history of xenophobia and misogyny, and we know we’ve justified our hateful beliefs with religion.

Brooks even goes so far as to hint at the passion these two outcasts feel for each other. It’s one scarlet letter from being a cliché.

The problem with this approach is that the author adopts the same “I’m right, and they’re wrong” approach that she accuses of her antagonists. Yes, right now, we can judge and say that Puritan sexism and discrimination did harm. And we can see how modern religious belief can do this. Are we comfortable slinging judgment to people who didn’t know any different? Might we also have lost something that they knew about simplicity and the power of faith? This book is a wholesale dismissal of the religion as purely tyrannical, sexist and racist (except for maybe the note that they did support education, for white males…) In contrast, the Wampanoag spirituality is free and wonderful and tree-huggy. Both Puritans and natives lack in scientific and medical knowledge, and both are riddled with superstition; yes, we know that. I wish Brooks could’ve been more complex than that., something about how people don’t know better, something about the power and price of integrated belief.

However, Brooks is such a brilliant writer, that she even makes this flaw mostly work. She describes the daily life in detail. She allows her characters some semblance of the language, so that it reads like an actual history. She finds words like “salvages” for the tribe, or “tegs” for the sheep. The emotional lives of her characters seem real, and she subtly tells us what daily life was like for Caleb and Bethia. Finally, Brooks also reaches some of the emotional heights that she soared through in March.

I just feel that Bethia is a typical narrator, and the themes are typical. It would’ve been lovely to hear from the minister father, a man who seemed to see some beauty in the Native beliefs but held on to his evangelism of Christianity. There are also Harvard scholars in the book who also seem to walk that thin line between the limits of their age and a willingness to help everyone reach their potential. A local farm by also might have a unique perspective. These other characters would’ve also made fascinating, more complex voices than just Bethia’s. The juxtaposition between their views, Caleb’s struggles, and Bethia’s insight would’ve been gripping.

I’ll still keep reading Brooks. I also keep hoping she gets back to the type of moral conundrum and complexity that drove March.

PS: As a side note, I love that the book’s pages are a slightly ivory color, and that the type font looks old, heavy with serifs. It brings to the reader a sense of the “oldness’ of this story. It was a nice touch by the bookmakers.