Library Loot ~ June 1-7

Caleb's Crossing ~ by Geraldine Brooks, 2011, fiction (Massachusetts)

Summary:  In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.  Vreeland used that fact to tell this story.  Bethia Mayfield, narrator of the novel, is growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans.

Restless and curious, she yearns after 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 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.

The Year of Magical Thinking ~ by Joan Didion, 2005, memoir

Look at that cover!  I haven't read anywhere that the four blue letters spell J-O-H-N, her husband who died.  I thought it look kind of "blah" until I noticed some of the letters were a different color.  Now I see why.

Summary:  The story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Library Loot is a weekly meme co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.  Marg has the Mister Linky this week, if you'd like to share a list of the loot you brought home.