Elizabeth George Speare (1908–1994)

I didn't think I was going to like this book after reading the first few chapters; too many hot-headed religious types for my taste. But I stuck with it, and was pleasantly surprised. I predicted long before how it was going to turn out. But it is sometimes not an unexpected conclusion that makes a book worthwhile, but rather how the author takes the reader to the longed-for conclusion. And there were a couple of surprises after all. I'm glad I gave this one a chance.

"Kit," the teenage heroine, leaves Barbados to go live with her aunt and her aunt's husband and children, none of whom has she ever met. Kit does a colossal job of not fitting in - so much so that the fanatically religious Puritans decide to put her on trial as a witch. But Kit is not the eponymous "witch of Blackbird pond." That appellation belongs to another - a poor, elderly Quaker woman, who is also in great danger from the community.… (mere)

Although he faces responsibility bravely, thirteen-year-old Matt is more than a little apprehensive when his father leaves him alone to guard their new cabin in the wilderness. When a renegade white stranger steals his gun, Matt realizes he has no way to shoot game or to protect himself. When Matt meets Attean, a boy in the Beaver clan, he begins to better understand their way of life and their growing problem in adapting to the white man and the changing frontier.

Elizabeth George Speare's Newbery Honor-winning survival story is filled with wonderful detail about living in the wilderness and the relationships that formed between settlers and natives in the 1700s.… (mere)

In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, a girl faces prejudice and accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Connecticut. A classic of historical fiction that continues to resonate across the generations.

Sixteen-year-old 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.

Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when it seems she must give up, she finds a kindred spirit. But Kit's friendship with Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, proves more taboo than she could have imagined and ultimately forces Kit to choose between her heart and her duty.… (mere)