Books like Our Beloved Kin — picked by fans

The book explores the cultural differences in the 1600s of Martha’s Vineyard of Native Americans and Puritans.

It is inspired by the story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, as narrated by his friend Bethia. She is forbidden education but learns from him. 

Brooks, as always, has characters teeming with excited tension and reveals historical life set in that time and place. I love her depiction of the early settling in of the Puritans.

He brings USA history to life using facts and creating well-written stories that are exciting and adventurous.

I somehow wound up with two of these books on my bookshelf and one ebook of this story. Guess I didn’t want to miss reading this important and fascinating book.

When I was researching my novel, I read many books on King Philip’s War, and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War is the best by far. Written in a readable prose style, and filled with detailed descriptions of events, the book riveted me from the first page. I also found myself returning to it time after time for clarification and specific information. I love the way it takes a deep dive into the origins and unfolding of the hostilities as well as looking at its long-lasting aftermath. It also includes a compelling account of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity and release as well as tracing James Printer’s activities.

Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity experience with Native Americans during King Philip’s War was one of the first bestsellers in the English colonies. And it’s the first published “captivity narrative” in what was to become a popular American literary genre. Rowlandson’s book is a fast-moving and dramatic account that describes in detail the attack that destroyed her home and culminated in her capture. She includes a harrowing account of carrying her fatally wounded daughter on an arduous journey, her despair when her daughter dies, her struggles to survive among people she’s been taught to revile, and her eventual ransom and release. This book has long been one of the most important primary sources documenting Native culture in New England at the time of English colonization.

We highly recommend this capacious “counter-archive” of Native writing because it definitively lays to rest the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Covering more than four centuries, it includes work from ten tribal nations from Maine to Connecticut in the form of early political petitions and land deeds to contemporary poetry and blogs. We love that its editor, a non-Native scholar, drew on the expertise of eleven Native editors from tribal communities for its diverse content, sourced from oral narratives, manuscripts stored in garages, and passed-around bootlegged copies. We also love that the book inspired a website for the extra material and for new work being produced now. In this sense, the website is a living document that illuminates the long history and vibrant presence of Indigenous writing.

This title caught my attention because we usually associate slavery with the American south. But the Puritans brought many indentured laborers from England to help build their settlements and operate their farms and businesses. When these white men worked their way to freedom, the settlers turned to indenturing Native Americans, and enslaving captives of warfare, selling some of them for goods and African slaves from the Caribbean. (I found a reference in this book that my ancestor, Dr. Mathew Fuller, participated in this trade during King Philip’s War.) Newell’s book, full of primary sources, gives excellent background on, and understanding of, the founding of New England’s culture, economy, and legal framework. Those alien ideas didn’t go so well for the original inhabitants as white settlers pushed westward. 

Addiction, grief, generational trauma… all these things exist in Talty’s work. But his prose lifts all that heaviness and makes it not only bearable, but often strangely beautiful.

His characters are raw and real, and his skill with dialogue is enviable. I love the way the book is structured as a collection of linked stories, each one informing and contributing to the rest. The book is set on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, an area often overlooked both in literature and reality.

Talty is a natural storyteller, and his voice rings with wisdom, dry humor, and honesty, giving readers rare insight into this community. 

This novel, published in 2000 by the University Press of New England, has in my opinion never gained the readership it deserves. It’s a rich, funny, deeply humane captivity tale based on the true story of Nathan Blake, who was taken by Algonkian-speaking people from his home in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1746, and brought up to Canada, where he was held for three years as a slave. The novel weaves a defamiliarized but extremely plausible-feeling tapestry of early colonial America that complicates the stereotypes established by Cooper’s influential novel set in the same period, and Hebert’s main character, Caucus-Meteor—an elderly, multilingual Indian and the last survivor of his band—is by my lights one of the great characters in literature.

When the Robertsons bought their 18th-century home in Hampton, Ct., they inherited an unparalleled lode of documents assembled over 100 years of the previous owners’ history. Starting in the 1790s, the Traintors saved, it seems, every bit of paper that came through their hands: from private letters and business accounts, to pamphlets, social invitations, school records, and, of course books. The Robertsons spent years digesting this remarkable trove. In this book, they “open out” the evidence – as Laurel Ulrich did for Martha Ballard’s diary – in a way that transforms it into a moving and deeply intimate story of family life and community change in a small New England town. I found their tale – told often in the Taintors’ own words – to be vivid, immediate, a surprisingly frank, personal, and moving story.

Jennifer Haigh's novel is a family saga that reads like a post-mortem. With alternating narration, each of the five family members gives their perspective on what led to the family's demise and current state. The novel's title, The Condition, seems to refer specifically to one child in the family who has been diagnosed with a rare medical condition called Turner's Syndrome. But throughout the book, it becomes clear that each family member has developed their own "condition" or way of existing that is just as much a part of their identity.