Witch Child Books

The spellbinding diary of a teenage girl who escapes persecution as a witch—only to face new intolerance in a Puritan settlement. Enter the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary’s startling story begins in 1659, the year her beloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch. Mary narrowly escapes a similar fate, only to face intolerance and new danger among the Puritans in the New World. How long can she hide her true identity? Will she ever find a place where her healing powers will not be feared? Just two weeks after publication, Celia Rees’s WITCH CHILD spirited its way onto the Book Sense Children’s Only 76 list as one of the Top 10 books that independent booksellers like to handsell. Within a month, this riveting book sold out its first two hardcover printings. Now, Candlewick Press is pleased to announce the publication of WITCH CHILD in paperback.

For the legions of readers spellbound by WITCH CHILD, here’s the fascinating next chapter - thanks to a Native American descendant with an uncanny link to the past. Agnes closed her eyes in the heat and steam of the sweat lodge. She woke to air that was dry and cold around her. She was no longer Agnes, or even Karonhisake, Searching Sky. She was no longer American or Haudenosaunee. She was English, and her name was Mary, and she woke to find that she was dying, freezing to death. It came to Agnes unbidden - a vision of Mary Newbury, alone in the snow, dying of the cold. A vision of a young woman who had lived in the 1600s, who had been driven from her Puritan settlement, accused of being a witch. It was an image of a woman whose life was about to change radically as she embarked on an existence that defied all accepted norms - embracing passionate independence, love, and loyalty to a proud, endangered community that accepted her as one of their own. Mary’s and Agnes’s lives have been separated by almost 400 years, but they are inextricably linked by more than blood. For, like Mary, Agnes has special powers - and Mary now seeks these powers to ensure that the rest of her story is told.