Malcom Gaskill's Between Two Worlds presents a vivid picture of the seventeenth-century English Atlantic. Evocatively written and richly illustrated with a deep well of primary sources and often purple early modern prose of suffering, starvation, disease, dislocation, and loneliness, its intended readers – largely those outside the academy – are asked to appreciate the courage and boldness of the English colonial venture in North America. Given the compelling picture Gaskill paints for them, they will do just that.

Gaskill's overall project is to chronicle what he calls a “neglected dimension of the history of England: what happened to its people in America, and the effect America had on those people who remained at home” (xii). He tells this history by simultaneously following two disparate aspects of the whole: first, how English colonists fared in the New World – their voyages, successes and failures once onshore, and gradual adjustments to a new environment – and second, the way that writers in England depicted the colonies. The book is, therefore, not, and does not pretend to be, a history of parallel or intertwined communities in the vein of Atlantic history, but rather two mutually informing strands of a single culture's conversation. English colonists moved west expecting particular futures based on what they read about the New World. When they were disappointed with what they found upon arrival (as they almost invariably were), their letters back home created a new New World for the next generation to engage. This formulation provides Gaskill with ample source material, as he pulls on rich accounts of what happened to colonists and also on equally rich promotional materials written about America. While his book does not shed new light on why colonists acted, it does give the reader a deeply textured understanding of how they explained their experiences.

Gaskill's focus is on the seventeenth century, which he divides into three sections. The first, reaching roughly to the start of the English Civil War, depicts “Plantings.” It is mostly a narrative of failure. The second, “Saints,” which covers the period from 1640 through 1676, depicts the process by which colonists finally secured a foothold for survival. A final section, “Warriors,” covers the violent years of King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, and the Salem witch trials. Gaskill's central actors throughout are New Englanders, balanced out with briefer mentions of those in Bermuda, Barbados, Jamaica, and the Chesapeake colonies. His focus on the English side includes promotional writers, such as John Smith and Richard Hakluyt, as well as countless lesser-known authors. These sources are particularly rich, as Gaskill uses diverse archival material to uncover how English writers depicted America.

A non-scholarly audience expecting a neat summary of the colonial period will learn much that they did not expect from this work. Gaskill's story of the difficulties of colonial efforts and his close narrative of the seventeenth century belie popular myths about colonial American history, namely that it was brief and succeeded easily because of abundant resources. On the other hand, a different set of common and uncomplicated wisdom will readily be reaffirmed. First, that the North Americans who mattered most were those who came from England. Second, that, overwhelmed by a massive challenge in the wilderness, the English responded with courage and ingenuity. Native Americans’ military responses to English invasion mattered in this reading of history mainly because they presented further opportunities for English Americans to be tested, though the courageous colonists seem bound to succeed, even if they suffered from doubt or just plain suffered. Similarly, slavery's development was regrettable but “inevitable” (317). On the one hand, as a history of English settlement, the focus on English colonists is entirely understandable. On the other, as a book geared towards a popular audience, this focus serves to reinforce quiet assumptions about agency and causality in history that many scholars would prefer to dispute.

Indeed, what caused historical events for English migrants in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, and specifically the role played by English colonists in their interactions with native peoples, are thorny issues for Between Two Worlds. Gaskill tends to treat North America in the way he argues that the English experienced it, as a wilderness filled with uncontrollable forces. For example, one learns that “English identity was being broken and remade in the wilderness” (258). This was undoubtedly true in many contexts, but the pace and breadth of Gaskill's narrative requires him to move on without careful discussions of what constituted identity for colonists or what aspect of the natural or human wilderness was breaking it. So when colonists had a “deepening impression” that “the waves of savagery that colonists had hoped to command were washing over them” (278), or when war started “with omens: a comet, a plague of insects, and a vast flock of pigeons not seen since the Indian uprising in the 1640s” (299), the reader is not invited to understand English colonists as active participants in a chain of historical events that led to deepening conflicts.

Instead, Gaskill's narrative focusses on the migrants’ emotions as they moved from one continent to the other and found themselves struggling against an unforgiving environment. He discusses, for example, how “pitiless ambition was bound up with an astonishing intensity of faith, forbearance, and courage” (xv). In some cases, emotions become agents in history, as when Gaskill writes that “countervailing forces shaped American identity” in the 1670s and 1680s, including not “just a love of home set against the lure of adventure, but hostility to England against pressure, at least among Protestants, to align one's conscience and loyalties with dissidents in England” (310). This is, at root, a story about how seventeenth-century English individuals felt about what happened to them and their compatriots in North America. It is therefore a story about reactions, not about actions. While a popular audience may find a great deal of empathy with the story's protagonists, they will not learn much about how and why English people chose to act in the ways that they did.

A great deal of detailed and nuanced research clearly went into this work and it is beautifully and lovingly written. Gaskill's careful examination of numerous primary sources in which seventeenth-century English people wrote about America suggests a deep, dynamic and influential conversation about which an academic reader would like to learn more. Ultimately, however, academic readers are not the intended audience of Between Two Worlds, and if it can spark a desire for more in even that audience, it will surely inspire the imaginations of those for whom the agonies of the era are uncharted territory. Gaskill has produced an intriguing and highly readable, even entertaining, narrative, and it will introduce a wide audience to the mystery and chaos of the English colonial project in the seventeenth century. One hopes those same readers will subsequently inquire further into how the actions of those settlers transformed not only their own lives, but also the lives of those they encountered and enslaved in the New World.