Witness

Blurb

Witness is a verse novel of historical fiction written by Karen Hesse in 2001, concentrating on racism in a rural Vermont town in 1924. Voices include those of Leanora Sutter, a 12-year-old African American girl; Esther Hirsh, a 6-year-old girl from New York; Sara Chickering, a quiet spinster farmer; Iris Weaver, a young restaurant owner, bootlegger and illegal booze runner; Reynard Alexander, the town newspaper editor; Merlin van Tornhout, an arrogant town 18-year-old; Johnny Reeves, the town preacher; and Percelle Johnson, town constable, age 66, Viola Pettibone, a store owner, along with her husband, Harver Pettibone —among several others, some of whom removed to join the newly arrived Ku Klux Klan including: Johnny Reeves, Merlin Van Tornhout and shopkeeper Harvey Pettibone.
In Witness, Hesse continues the distinctive poetic style she pioneered in Out of the Dust. The two books are part of a notable recent cluster of verse novels for children and young adults.
It is in first-person narration, though with each new page a different narrator is used forming a series of monologues by different characters affected by the same series of actions. The book is split into five acts.