Read Alouds--The Witch of Blackbird Pond

I'm a little behind on my read aloud reviews.  We finished The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare back in the fall.  She is the same author as our previous read The Sign of the Beaver.  As in that book, Speare takes a rather critical view of the people of a particular period in history.  This time her aim is at the rigid Puritans.  When Kit joins her aunt and her family in New England from Barbados, cultures clash.  Kit is a free loving, literary type from the warm shores of a Caribbean island.  Her aunt and her two daughters live in the cold world of New England puritanism, under the reign of a patriarchal father.  Kit's only solace is found in the home of a Quaker woman who man in the town suspect of being a witch.

The book is well written and it is always good for us to have a story where the protagonist is a girl.  It helps pull Molly into what we're reading more.  It's a good story, but sometimes I do get a little tired of the whole, critical view looking back.  Certainly there were Puritans that were too rigid, just as it was a tragedy how the white men treated the Native Americans when they came.  It is important for us to look back at those times and learn from the mistakes that were made, but it is also important to do so with grace and understanding.  Would we have made similar decisions had we lived in the same period?