The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Elizabeth George Speare
Paperback
(Harpercollins Pub Ltd, March 31, 2003)
Witch trials in seventeeth-century Connecticut -- a Newbery-Medal winning classic. Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met. Kit's unconventional background and high-spirited ways immediately clash with the Puritanical lifestyle of her uncle's household, and despite her best efforts to adjust, it seems Kit will never win the favour of those around her. Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place, and just when it seems she must give up, she finds a kindred spirit. But Kit's friendship with old Hannah Tupper, who is believed by the colonists to be a witch, proves more taboo than she could have imagined, and ultimately Kit is forced to choose between her heart and her duty. Elizabeth George Speare's Newbery Medal-winning novel portrays the life of a girl uprooted from her birthplace and yet unbound by the suppression of her new home, a heroine whom readers will admire for her unwavering sense of truth as well as her infinite capacity to love.
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