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Constance by Patricia Clapp
 | Constance Patricia Clapp Date: 1991-09-18 — Book Rating: |
Constance is one of my favorite reads from my younger years. I can still remember how I thought this book was soooooooooo romantic. I read the Nicholas parts over and over and over; doing that kind of blinded me to the fact that this isn't really a romance, even a YA romance.
Constance Hopkins was around fifteen years old when she came over with her father, stepmother, brother, and half-sister on the Mayflower in 1620. The author, Patricia Clapp, is one of her many decendants, and it's easy to tell from the story that this book is a labor of love. The book is told entirely from the adolescent Constance's point of view, and the journey of the Mayflower and the establishment of the Plymouth colony isn't idealized. At the beginning of the book Constance is openly hostile about her uprooting to the New World. It was not her decision to come, and she misses London and all of its comforts terribly. She complains about the conditions and expresses her discontent clearly and frequently. It isn't hard to see why she is unhappy. Conditions aboard the Mayflower are terrible, the Hopkins aren't part of the religious community that makes up Plymouth, and the first winter half of the "pilgrims" die of disease or hunger.
Eventually, however, things begin to stabilize, and the focus of the story shifts from pure survival to the difficulties of establishing a working society in an unknown environment. Constance's everyday trevails dealing with her family's problems and her own social mistakes is another focus. Constance isn't a perfect character. She isn't the first to volunteer for unpleasant duties, she isn't always cheerful about circumstances, and she revels a little in her personal power over a number of single men in the colony. What struck me about the book reading it this time, besides how long the hunger lasted, was the notion of how much power an attractive, unattached female had in a group of mostly bachelor men. Constance milks this a bit with sometimes ugly consequences. I'm not sure how much of this is based on actual circumstances - William Bradford kept a detailed diary of the colony's happenings - but it's good reading.
The later part of the book, several years after the colony is up and running, centers more on Constance's romantic life. She has several suitors and some conflicting feelings for all of them. Clearly Clapp was not a romance novelist, but there is some nice (chaste) sexual tension here, certainly enough to make my teenage heart go pitter-patter.
Several years ago when I was leading a monthly mother/daughter book talk, we read Constance during the month of November, and it was a very appropriate choice. Included here is, of course, the story of the first Thanksgiving. But it is more than a sappy rendition complete with friendly Indians and upright God-fearing Pilgrims. It gives enough detail about what came before that Thanksgiving for the reader to understand why the Pilgrims were so thankful to still be alive. And it does so without sacrificing the dignity of the first inhabitants. It's impossible to know how Constance Hopkins really felt about the Indians of the region, but this Constance has a number of feelings that change over time as she interacts more and more with them and they impact each other's lives.
In the last ten years there has been a spate of books published that portray history through the eyes of young girls. The American Girl series and the Dear America series are just two attempts to integrate history and fiction. While these series have their fans, Constance is a step above either. Clapp's dialogue feels just right and she includes a great deal of information about the period without it ever feeling artificial or stuffed in. I would recommend this book to anyone interested either in history or the YA genre. Or to a romance reader who is open to a story with a younger protagonist.
One final note: for those readers who crave a "happy" ending, Constance Hopkins lived to be an old woman , had many children with her husband, and was mentioned fondly in his last will and testament. He left behind enough to be divided among his sons, so it can be assumed that they were financially stable.