The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a children's novel by the American writer Elizabeth George Speare, published in 1958. It won the Newbery Medal in 1959, and it is set in late seventeenth-century New England.

Katherine Tyler, who is called Kit, has grown up in Barbados. When her grandfather dies she sails to Connecticut to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan settlement of Wethersfield, and the cold, bleak shore she sees when she arrives is nothing like the island she came from.

In the town she is expected to work and to keep her opinions, and she fits badly. On the voyage she has befriended Nat Eaton, the son of a ship's captain, and in Wethersfield the one place she feels easy is the meadow, where she spends time with an old Quaker woman whom the neighbours call the witch of Blackbird Pond. When that friendship becomes known, Kit finds herself facing suspicion and anger, and she is accused of witchcraft herself. The friendship puts her at odds with the town's ministers and with her own relatives as well.