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fine lines
The Witch of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit-Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer/reviewer/blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads Elizabeth George Speare's 1958 young adult novel 'The Witch Of Blackbird Pond', in which Kit Tyler, a hothouse flower from Barbados, goes to the Colonies and learns the perils of actually knowing how to swim.
ON A MORNING in mid-April, the brigantine Dolphin left the open sea, sailed briskly across the Sound to the wide mouth of the Connecticut River and into Saybrook Harbor. Kit Tyler had been on the forecastle deck since daybreak, standing close to the rail, staring hungrily at the first sight of land in five weeks."There's Connecticut colony," a voice spoke in her ear. "You've come a long way to see it."
Ahhh! Don't talk in my ear. For whatever reason, for the first time in my Fine Lines career, the story of Kit Tyler was completely excised from my brain. I couldn't tell you why. I've only read it, like, 34 times, and the yellow spine of the cover I had — a dark, moony head rising up mistily from a swamp—is ineluctably seared in its place on my 8-year-old bookshelf. I mean, I think I read it as recently as a few years ago after stealing it from a doctor's office's waiting room or something.
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