THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND

I had definitely heard of this novel by Elizabeth George Speare—it’s a YA classic and won the Newbery in 1959—but I’m not sure I ever read it as a child. As much as I liked stories set in Olden Times, I preferred the frontier to the colonies and the nineteenth century to the earlier ones, so I may have avoided it on that count, or perhaps I read it and forgot it. I certainly didn’t find it that memorable this time around, when I read it for my book club; it was well written, had a strong heroine, and felt fairly accurate, but the plot was standard historical fiction with few surprises. I liked it fine, but I didn’t love it and wouldn’t reread it.