Not my usual kind of reading, but one of the profiles was an ancestor of mine, so I was curious. Not overly scholarly, an easy read

This book disappointed me tremendously. I read it hoping for a better understanding of the lives of the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower (especially those whose names I had never come across during Thanksgiving pageants at school.) I wanted to understand their experiences aboard the ship, and of the lives of those they left behind.

Whittock features but a few people in this book (14 to be exact.) His research focuses on the facts of their lived experience in Plymouth Colony, rather than exploring the personalities of these brave souls: Capt Christopher Jones, William Bradford, Susanna White, Stephen Hopkins, Mary Chilton, John Howland, William Brewster, Edward Winslow, Capt Myles Standish, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, The Billingtons, Richard More, and Squanto. Squanto was an important personage in the early years of the Colony, and he knew several of Whittock’s featured fourteen, but, unlike them, he did not arrive on the Mayflower. Of these fourteen, I entered the book with a basic understanding of seven, including their contribution to the Plymouth story and, often, a little of their reputation.
I am a descendant of at least one of the 102 Mayflower passengers, and I hoped to cross check and learn more about my ancestry. Alas, with only 14 featured characters, and a tremendous amount of repetition, I was unable to glean any new knowledge.

Whittock offers titillating stories of pilgrim sex, deviance, criminality, and violence—not to mention a chapter written solely to delve into a salacious retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, which is not the story of either Plymouth Colony or the Mayflower. In a strained attempt to make a connection, he identifies the one Mayflower passenger who, very aged, was probably still alive during the trials.

The writing style is tiresome. Each chapter focuses on one of the curated individuals. In order to describe those individuals as fulsomely as possible, he often employs other Mayflower lives to play supporting roles. For example, a widow remarries a titular character. Later on, when the titular character is now the widow, Whittock doesn't just remind his reader of her past. Instead, he retells her entire story. And he will tell it again a third time when a third character features in the story.

Whittock is a fan of leading the reader a long way in one direction only to say, "but that is not what happened." This proved most annoying after reading several pages of action only to learn that it was all a myth later created, with no evidence to support it nor disprove it. Because I was reading the book as a research project, I highlighted passages as I read. Having the author write a fiction, only to later debunk it, was confusing and provoking.

If you know very little about the Plymouth Colony, and want to learn about it, how it was created and where it led, this basic book will do the trick. It’s clear, engaging, and its stylistic annoyances can be ignored. It doesn't read like a textbook, but it doesn’t flow the way narrative non-fiction, should. Sadly, I'll need to read another book about The Mayflower passengers. If you have a good one in mind, please share the title. As for Mayflower Lives, I don’t recommend it.

Interesting to learn more about individual members who arrived on the Mayflower.

If I were Martyn Whittock's editor, I would tell him that he has a lot of good content, but Mayflower Lives needs some serious re-working. His biographical concept, wherein he explores the Plymouth experience through 15 parallel lives, makes for a lot of redundancy - sometimes confusing and often annoying. A chronological narrative or even thematic organization would have been more effective, but I recognize the "lives" framework is Whittock's attempt to make a unique contribution to the oeuvre of Mayflower scholarship.

Stylistically, there are problems as well. The early chapters in particular felt very elementary, with extreme overuse of exclamation points, ellipses, and phrases such as "the reader will see." There was also way too much surmising of thoughts and feelings, which felt so out of place in what purports to be an academic study.

Still, I tried to ignore all the annoyances (and there were less of them as the book went on) and gain what I could from the content. As a Mayflower descendant, I was keen to see the names of my ancestors pop up. I also had a greater interest after visiting Plimoth Plantation last summer, where I "met" many of the real characters Whittock spotlights.

So... not a waste of time, but not something I'd recommend to other readers. If you want to learn more about the Pilgrim settlement, read Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. 3 stars for this one.

This book could have greatly benefited from better editing. Whereas the information contained within is compelling and interesting in the way each person is presented as a chapter, the writing style was childish and was very distracting. Author’s overuse of exclamation marks, cliche and editorializing detracted from the content.

This popular account of some of the immigrants' lives who came over to current day Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620 seems well-researched and well-intentioned, but the writing style was not to my taste - it took me out of the narrative too much, and/or was overly religious and laudatory, peppered with exclamations. You may enjoy it more than I did, however, and there were a lot of interesting insights into who lived and died in the first few years of their colony, how the Strangers and Separatists got along, and how their religion compared to that held by those English that settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the following years.

I did appreciate the attention paid to gender roles, marriage, and sexuality!