The Witch of Blackbird Pond

I'm listening to this in the car to start preparing for BOB. Did I actually like this in grade school? Maybe it's because the woman who's reading it has a really annoying voice, but I can barely keep from zoning out. Not a great start to my BOB reading!

Ok, I finished listening, and now I remember why I liked it when I was in grade school. Speare provides such a nice closure to all the relationships, that you feel reassured when finished. I'm interested to see what the kids' reactions to it will be though, because it does feel dated.

Kit is new to the American colonies. As she flees from the future awaiting her in Barbados, she shows up at her Aunt's house, not really knowing what to expect.
As time moves forward, she finds herself not being able to fit in, and everything that she does is never good enough. Her cousin Judith seems to resent her, her uncle wishes she had been a boy, but Mercy and her Aunt Rachel seem glad to have her. While she does her best to adapt to the new lifestyle that she has walked into, she learns that she must tread carefully.
When she befriends Hannah Tupper, the widow who lives on the edge of the swamp, her aunt expresses her desire that she not go there at all. Her uncle forbids her to do so, but Kit keeps returning to the rundown shack. Hannah seems to understand her, and she feels more comfortable there than she does in her uncles home. When many in the town fall ill with a fever, some of the townsfolk go after Hannah, believing her to be a witch. Kit knows that she isnt, and so forming a quick decision, she runs to the cabin and alerts her to the oncoming danger. Having secured her with Nat, the son of the Captain of the Dolphin, Kit returns home. Shortly thereafter, she is accused of being a witch. Taken into custody and awaiting the trial that can determine whether she will live or die, Kit is scared to death. Her aunt steals to make sure that she is alright, but Kit knows that there is really no one who can help her. But sometimes help comes in the smallest of packages, and hope for a future that might have been lost is once again rekindled.

I really enjoyed reading this! I should have read it years ago, but never did. I am looking forward to sharing this with my boys, and hope that they enjoy it as much as I did!

I've avoided this book, thinking it was a rehash of stories about women accused of being witches during the early days of America.

It was about women accused of being witches, but it was really about so much more.

Kit impulsively hops on a ship to America after the death of her grandfather, leaving behind the beautiful tropical islands where she was so freely raised. She goes to find a home with her only remaining relatives, her mother's sister and her family. Kit's aunt, she learns, has been worn down by life in America and by her marriage to a Puritan man. But these characters are not stiff stereotypes; the harshly Puritan uncle loves American freedom, not the English king; the dangerous witch the community fears is really a quiet, lonely Quaker woman; the man who loves Kit fails to step forward to help her when Kit is in trouble. An excellent, thoughtful story of how being different can both threaten a society and build a society.

Book Review: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare - winner of the 1958 Newberry Award. There are some parts where the portrayal of Puritans is not all that accurate, but as a middle grade Historical Fiction book, primarily about understanding the difference in others, it is excellent.

Click through for the longer review on my blog at http://bookwi.se/witch-blackbird-pond/

Another entry in the Children's Books I Didn't Read as a Child list, and I've gotta say most of the time when I read middle-grade type stuff, I come away much more impressed than I do with a lot of “grown-up” literature. I won't summarize, you can find that elsewhere; I liked Kit as a narrator, and her naivete (or optimism, I prefer!) reminded me a lot of how I thought as a somewhat immature 16-year-old, wanting to make the most of things, “bloom where I was planted” so to speak, fall in love, be accepted despite the weirdo things about me. (Gasp, I can both read and swim! lol) I worried that it was going to take a darker turn there towards the end, with the witch trials and the rumblings of war with England, but I thought it wrapped up perfectly. Speare didn't shy away from showing how things would have been, doing so in an age-appropriate manner while still getting to the heart of the history, and I always appreciate that in children's lit.

I listened to the audiobook, which was very good.

This is a book that I have been meaning to read for a while, having been on my Want to Read list ever since I first joined Goodreads years ago. I initially liked it because of the premise, and because it had won the Newbery award in 1959. Yet, my initial anticipation at wanting to read this book turned into disappointment, the more I read, because The Witch of Blackbird pond is not nearly exciting as it's premise proposes to be. It makes the decision to exchange a tense trial and look into Puritan religious views for tales of domestic life in the late 1600s.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond describes the life of Orphan Kit Tyler as she moves from her home in Barbados to live in the Connecticut Colony with her Aunt Rachel, Uncle Mathew, and her three cousins. She comes to find the day to day life there difficult, being unable to complete even the most basic task that makes up the myriad of chores set before the Puritan family. This is not to mention the long religious services, which Kit, a non-puritan, finds excruciatingly dull. To combat her boredom and despair, Kit eventually befriends an old woman named Hannah, who lives in Blackbird Pond. Her Uncle eventually finds out that Kit is seeing her, and commands Kit not to go there, saying that Hannah is both a quaker and is not to be trusted because the townsfolk believe her to be a witch. Of course Kit doesn't listen, and this comes back to haunt her, causing Kit to be marked as a witch herself. Now Kit must find a way out of this situation that doesn't involve a being on the end of hangman's noose.

This novel works to describe the day to day events and life of the Puritans quite well. One can truly appreciate the work that had to go into the most basic of tasks that we take for granted today. Everything from making supper to preparing clothing for the family takes hours of backbreaking work from before the sun comes up to when the moon is high in the sky at night. This is something that the children who read this novel can learn to appreciate. I also enjoyed how Speare manages to portray Kit and her views on slavery. Kit thinks of herself as working like a slave while she does chores with her extended family, and she does not see anything as wrong with the system. I enjoyed this as a refreshing viewpoint, because it is now up to the reader to understand that people are always going to believe in things that you disagree with, and just because they do not see X or Y thing as wrong does not make them a bad person. In today's politically charged environment, this is something that kids can learn from and appreciate. It also makes for a morally complex character than one usually sees when it comes to a character and viewpoints on slavery.

That is all I can think of for the positives, and here is where the negatives seem to crop up for me. The biggest of these being that the charge of Kit being a witch, and the subsequent trial only occurs in the last 16% of the novel. Even then, this is over in about a chapter at most. And I'm not just talking about the actual trial scene, itself, I mean that from the time she is found out, confronted, arrested, imprisoned, tried, and found not guilty last for all of maybe 20 pages (or so it feels, I listened to this on audiobook). This means that a majority of the book is filled with content about domestic life, who is courting who, and who are prominent members of the local community. As someone who began this book looking forward to the premise found on the back cover, this all feels unnecessary by the end of the novel.

Normally I would not mind this, if there was some exploration of why Kit was thought of to be a witch, or what drives the common thought behind witchcraft, but there isn't at all. No mention of theology, religion, or political differences are made for the reader. We get no mention to Kit about why Hannah is such a bad person other than the fact that she is a Quaker. Yet, we get no information on what this means, or why it is significant, and the uninformed reader may think being a Quaker may mean that Hannah likes Quaker Oats and the town does not, for all the explanation the author provides. This is a serious disservice to the reader, as this is the element that drives much of the events in most of the book. It would not even have been difficult, since Kit does not know very much about Puritan society to begin with, so it would not be out of place for her to have questions and need answers, and those answers can inform both her and the reader. Why was this missed?

Couple this with characters that feel flat and boring for most of the book, and this is a novel that left me feeling unsatisfied by the end. I just don't believe it was worth the price of admission, even for such a small book. I give it a two out of five.