My grandparents gave me this book when I was ten, and somehow I never read it. I have no idea why I didn't; it's exactly the sort of book I ate up as a child, historical fiction about a girl all alone in the world having to find her way. It's especially perplexing to me since I'm sure part of why they gave me the book is that it's set in a town very close to where they lived, and I loved visiting their house. What gives, ten year old me? It's a mystery.
The good news is that I got to read it now, and I really enjoyed it. It takes place in the mid-17th century and focuses on a 16-year-old girl named Kit, who was raised on Barbados by her grandfather after both of her parents died when she was young. After his death, she leaves Barbados for Connecticut, where her mother's sister and her family live. She discovers that the life of puritans in the colonies is very different than what she had experienced on the island, and is met with suspicion from the outset. This suspicion isn't helped when she befriends Hannah Tupper, the Quaker woman who lives on Blackbird Pond and is shunned by the town.
Even though it's a children's book and therefore I assumed it had to end happily, I actually found a lot of this book quite stressful. Part of that is because I dislike The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter so much, and so any story involving the same issues is going to make me unhappy on some level, even if things end well. Once I got to the end of the story I was then able to reflect on what I really liked about it, and enjoy what it was. I don't know; I think that I would have been better off reading this when I had been younger, because my experience with narratives wouldn't have colored how I read this book. And that's not the book's fault, that's all on me.
Grade: A
The good news is that I got to read it now, and I really enjoyed it. It takes place in the mid-17th century and focuses on a 16-year-old girl named Kit, who was raised on Barbados by her grandfather after both of her parents died when she was young. After his death, she leaves Barbados for Connecticut, where her mother's sister and her family live. She discovers that the life of puritans in the colonies is very different than what she had experienced on the island, and is met with suspicion from the outset. This suspicion isn't helped when she befriends Hannah Tupper, the Quaker woman who lives on Blackbird Pond and is shunned by the town.
Even though it's a children's book and therefore I assumed it had to end happily, I actually found a lot of this book quite stressful. Part of that is because I dislike The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter so much, and so any story involving the same issues is going to make me unhappy on some level, even if things end well. Once I got to the end of the story I was then able to reflect on what I really liked about it, and enjoy what it was. I don't know; I think that I would have been better off reading this when I had been younger, because my experience with narratives wouldn't have colored how I read this book. And that's not the book's fault, that's all on me.
Grade: A
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