Witch Child

Witch Child is a historical novel for young readers by the English writer Celia Rees, published in 2000.

The book is presented as a journal found in the binding of an old quilt, and it is written in the voice of a girl who is trying to keep her own record of what happens to her. Mary Newbury's grandmother was hanged after a trial at which Mary's evidence did not save her, and afterwards Mary is bundled onto an emigrant ship rather than left where the authorities can find her. The crossing is long and the passengers are divided by religion and by fear, and the community that grows up on the edge of the forest in Massachusetts turns out to be as dangerous to her as England was. Rees keeps her fictional diarist inside the events of the period, including the arrival of strangers with a different theology, the fear of the forest, and the trials of women who were accused of things their neighbours did not understand.

The novel was written after the author read about seventeenth-century witch persecution and the first New England settlements, and it stands as the first half of a story that continues in another book.