The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Sixteen year old Kit Tyler leaves her sunny, comfortable life in Barbados after her grandfather's death and sails to Wethersfield, Connecticut, in April 1687 to live with an aunt's Puritan family she has never met, a household run on discipline, plain dress and constant labor that Kit finds nearly impossible to adjust to. During the voyage she befriends the captain's son Nat Eaton, the ship's first mate and, on impulse, dives into the water to rescue a child's dropped doll, a spontaneous act of swimming skill that immediately marks her in the colonists' eyes as suspiciously unnatural. In Wethersfield Kit finds an unlikely friend in Hannah Tupper, an elderly Quaker woman who lives alone at the edge of town and is already whispered about as a witch, and Kit secretly begins teaching Hannah's young companion Prudence to read, a kindness that later matters more than Kit could have guessed. When illness sweeps the village, fear curdles into open accusations of witchcraft against Hannah, and Kit helps her escape before she herself is arrested and put on trial for witchcraft. At the trial, Nat produces Prudence as an unexpected witness, and the girl's ability to read scripture aloud and write her own name persuades the jury that Kit's teaching served faith rather than opposed it, securing Kit's acquittal. The book ends with Kit choosing to stay in Connecticut, marrying Nat, who names his own new ship, fittingly, the Witch.

It moves at a steady, absorbing pace and gives a vivid, specific picture of Puritan daily life and its suspicion of anyone unlike itself, without ever losing Kit's own warmth as a narrator.