| I. Ancient Civilizations |
YA
COONEY |
The Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney
Taken from her home on an Aegean island as a six-year-old girl, Anaxandra calls on the protection of her goddess while she poses as two different princesses over the next six years, before ending up as a servant in the company of Helen and Paris as they make their way to Troy. |
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YA-PAP
GERAS |
Troy by Adele Geras
The siege of Troy has lasted almost ten years. Inside the walled city, food is scarce and death is common. From the heights of Mount Olympus, the Gods keep watch. But Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is bored with the endless, dreary war. Aided by Eros's bow, the goddess sends two sisters down a bloody path to an awful truth: In the fury of war, love strikes the deadliest blows. |
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| II. European |
YA-PAP
BROOKS |
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. |
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YA
CHEANEY |
The Playmaker by J.B. Cheaney
A thrilling romp through Elizabethan London, peopled with actors, imposters, spies, traitors--and a young apprentice in Shakespeare's theater company. After the death of his mother, Richard Malory journeys to London--seeking his fortune and perhaps the father who abandoned him as a child. |
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YA-PAP
CHEVALIER |
The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
In seventeenth-century Delft, there's a strict social order -rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant -and all know their place. When Griet becomes a maid in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, she thinks she knows her role: housework, laundry, and the care of his six children. When Vermeer paints her wearing his wife's pearl earrings, the gossip escalates into a full-blown scandal that irrevocably changes Griet's life. |
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YA
CUSHMAN |
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
Catherine, a spirited and inquisitive young woman of good family, narrates in diary form the story of her fourteenth year--the year 1290. |
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YA
HEUSTON |
Dante's Daughter by Kimberly Heuston
Historian Heuston has meticulously researched the life and times of 14th-century poet Dante in order to create this fictional account of the great poet's daughter, Beatrice, in the decades preceding the Italian Renaissance. |
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YA
HOOPER |
At the Sign of the Sugared Plum by Mary Hooper
In 17th-century London, Hannah arrives to help her sister, Sarah, in her candy shop, The Sugared Plum. But even as the Plague ravages the city and residents begin to flee, Hannah is determined to stay. |
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YA
HOOPER |
Petals in the Ashes by Mary Hooper
This gripping account of London's Great Fire of 1666 begins as the city is recovering from losses during the Plague. Hannah from "At the Sign of the Sugared Plum" returns to manage the sweet shop on her own, but her newfound happiness is short-lived as fires begin to spring up around the city and quickly move closer to their shop. (The sequel to At the Sign of the Sugared Plum). |
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YA-PAP
HOROWITZ |
The Devil and His Boy by Anthony Horowitz
Young Tom Falconer is miserable working at The Pig's Head Inn in Elizabethan England. When a mysterious gentleman takes Tom to a new life, he thinks it's a miracle. But then the gentleman is murdered, and Tom is left to find his way around London on his own. When Tom gets involved with a group of actors putting on a play, he doesn't suspect their plot to overthrow the queen. |
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YA
LASKY |
Blood Secret by Kathryn Lasky
Fourteen-year-old Jerry Luna, mute since her mother's disappearance, is sent to her great-great aunt Constanza's house, where she discovers a trunk that draws her into the world of her ancestors during the Spanish Inquisition. |
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YA
MEYER |
Beware Princess Elizabeth by Carolyn Meyer
After the death of her father, King Henry VIII, in 1547, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth must endure the political intrigues and dangers of the reigns of her half-brother Edward and her half-sister Mary before finally becoming Queen of England eleven years later. |
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YA
MEYER |
Mary, Bloody Mary by Carolyn Meyer
Mary Tudor, who would reign briefly as Queen of England during the mid-sixteenth century, tells the story of her troubled childhood as daughter of King Henry VIII. |
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YA
NAPOLI |
Daughter of Venice by Donna Jo Napoli
Frustrated with the restrictions her gender imposes on her life, fourteen-year-old Donata, disguised as a boy, sneaks out of her noble family's house to roam the streets of late sixteenth-century Venice and then must confront the repercussions of her actions. |
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YA
TEM |
The Ramsay Scallop: A Novel by Frances Temple
At the turn of the fourteenth century in England, fourteen-year-old Elenor finds her betrothal to an ambitious lord's son launching her on a memorable pilgrimage to far-off Spain. |
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YA
TURNBULL |
No Shame, No Fear by Ann Turnbull
In England in 1662, a time of religious persecution, fifteen-year-old Susanna, a poor country girl and a Quaker, and seventeen-year-old William, a wealthy Anglican, meet and fall in love against all odds. |
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YA
YOLEN |
Girl in a Cage by Jane Yolen
As English armies invade Scotland in 1306, eleven-year-old Princess Marjorie, daughter of the newly crowned Scottish king, Robert the Bruce, is captured by England's King Edward Longshanks and held in a cage on public display. |
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| III. World War I |
YA
BRESLIN |
Remembrance by Theresa Breslin
The destinies of two Scottish families, one of shopkeepers and one of wealth and power, become entwined through their involvement in World War I, social causes, and love. |
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YA
MORPURGO |
Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
When Thomas Peaceful's older brother is forced to join the British Army, Thomas decides to sign up as well, although he is only fourteen years old, to prove himself to his country, his family, his childhood love, Molly, and himself. |
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| IV. World War II and the Holocaust |
YA
CHAMBERS |
Postcards from No Man's Land by Aiden Chambers
Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation. |
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YA
ELLIOTT |
Under a War-Torn Sky by Laura Elliott
After his plane is shot down by Hitler's Luftwaffe, nineteen-year-old Henry Forester of Richmond, Virginia, strives to walk across occupied France, with the help of the French Resistance, in hopes of rejoining his unit. |
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YA
HUGHES |
Soldier Boys by Dean Hughes
Two boys, one German and one American, are eager to join their respective armies during World War II, and their paths cross at the Battle of the Bulge. |
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YA
ISAACS |
Torn Thread by Anne Isaacs
In an attempt to save his daughter's life, Eva's father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her sister survive the war. |
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JUV
LISLE |
The Art of Keeping Cool by Janet Taylor Lisle
Only Robert ever sees the plane. But the pilot is shadowy -- maybe his missing father, maybe not. Robert doesn't mention this vision to Elliot, his cousin, whom he meets when he moves from Ohio with his mother and sister to live out the war with his grandparents in Rhode Island. The time is February 1942, and Nazi submarines are torpedoing U.S. ships off the coast. This is a story of dangers lurking inside and outside a house, of deceptive enemies and secrets held too long, and how two friends must find their own very different ways of fighting back. |
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YA
MAZER |
Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor by Harry Mazer
While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7, 1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell. |
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YA
MAZER |
A Boy No More by Harry Mazer
After his father is killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adam, his mother, and sister are evacuated from Hawaii to California, where he must deal with his feelings about the war, Japanese internment camps, his father, and his own identity. (Sequel to Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor). |
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YA
NAP |
Stones in Water by Donna Jo Napoli
After being taken by German soldiers from a local movie theater along with other Italian boys including his Jewish friend, Roberto is forced to work in Germany, escapes into the Ukrainian winter, before desperately trying to make his way back home to Venice. |
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YA
ZINDEL |
The Gadget by Paul Zindel
In 1945, having joined his father at Los Alamos, where he and other scientists are working on a secret project to end World War II, thirteen-year-old Stephen becomes caught in a web of secrecy and intrigue. |
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| V. American |
YA
AMBROSE |
This Vast Land: A Young Man's Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Novel by Stephen E. Ambrose
The bestselling historian's only work of fiction, published posthumously, tells the story of an 18-year-old member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, whose diary details his five-year journey with the Corps of Discovery. |
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YA
AUCH |
Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch
Sixteen-year-old Margaret Rose Nolan, newly arrived from Ireland, finds work at New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory shortly before the 1911 fire in which 146 employees died. |
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YA
AYRES |
North by Night: A Story of the Underground Railroad
by Katherine Ayers
Presents the journal of Lucinda Spencer, a sixteen-year-old girl, whose family
operates a stop on the Underground Railroad. |
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YA
BLACKWOOD |
The Year of the Hangman by Gary Blackwood
In 1777, having been kidnapped and taken forcibly from England to the American colonies, fifteen-year-old Creighton becomes part of developments in the political unrest there that may spell defeat for the patriots and change the course of history. |
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YA
BRENAMAN |
Evvy's Civil War by Miriam Brenaman
Evvy Chamberlyn, the eldest of six sisters in the 1860s, is not a typical Southern girl. She is exceptionally well educated, with a love for learning and teaching that pleases her father, head of a Virginia boys' academy. In Virginia in 1860, on the verge of the Civil War, fourteen-year-old Evvy chafes at the restrictions that her society places on both women and slaves. |
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YA
BRUCHAC |
Sacajawea: The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Joseph Bruchac
Captured by her enemies, married to a foreigner, and a mother at age sixteen, Sacajawea lived a life of turmoil and change. Then in 1804, the mysterious young Shoshone woman known as Bird Woman met Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Acting as interpreter, peacemaker, and guide, Sacajawea bravely embarked on an epic journey that altered history forever. Hear her extraordinary story, told by Sacajawea and by William Clark, in alternating chapters and including parts of Clark's original diaries. |
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YA
BRUCHAC |
The Winter People by Joseph Bruchac
As the French and Indian War rages in October of 1759, Saxso, a fourteen-year-old Abenaki boy, pursues the English rangers who have attacked his village and taken his mother and sisters hostage. |
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YA
CARBONE |
Storm Warriors by Elise Carbone
Driven from his home by the Ku Klux Klan and still reeling from the death of his mother, Nathan moves with his father and grandfather to the desolate Pea Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina to start a new life. But the reality of post-Civil War racism starts to show itself as he gradually realizes the futility of his dream. And then another dream begins to take shape, one that Nathan refuses to let anyone take from him. |
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JUV
FLETCHER |
Walk Across the Sea by Susan Fletcher
In late nineteenth-century California, when Chinese immigrants are being driven out or even killed for fear they will take jobs from whites, fifteen-year-old Eliza Jane McCully defies the townspeople and her lighthouse-keeper father to help a Chinese boy who has been kind to her. |
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YA
GOODMAN |
Hope's Crossing by Joan E. Goodman
When kidnapped by English Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, thirteen-year-old Hope draws on every ounce of courage within her to respond to the ordeal. |
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YA
HAHN |
Hear the Wind Blow by Mary Dowling Hahn
On a cold, snowy night, Haswell Magruder makes a decision that will have a profound effect on his own life as well as the lives of all those he loves. After leading his younger sister to safety with relatives, Haswell sets out on his journey in search of his older brother, a Confederate soldier. His quest is also a passage into manhood, as he experiences the last bloody days of the Civil War. |
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YA
HESSE |
Witness by Karen Hesse
Told in a series of poems that express the views of various people in a small Vermont town, including a young black girl and a young Jewish girl, during the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan is trying to infiltrate the town. |
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YA
HOLM |
Boston Jane: An Adventure by Jennifer Holm
Sixteen-year-old Jane Peck has ventured to the unknown wilds of the Northwest to wed her childhood idol, William Baldt. Thrown upon her wits in the wild, Jane must determine for herself whether she is truly proper Miss Jane Peck of Philadelphia, faultless young lady and fiancée, or Boston Jane, as the Chinook dub her, fearless and loyal woman of the frontier. |
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YA
MCMULLAN |
How I Found the Strong: A Civil War Story
by Margaret McMullan
McMullan pens a gripping story of ten-year-old Frank Russell, who comes of age too soon during the Civil War--a war that mercilessly robs Frank of a simpler way of life, his boyhood, his family, and his idealistic dreams. |
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YA
PAU |
Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen
Told in the voice of Sarny, aged twelve, a female slave at the Waller plantation, who first sees Nightjohn when he is brought there with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars. He had escaped north to freedom, but he came back--came back to teach reading. |
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YA
PAU |
Sarny, A Life Remembered
by Gary Paulsen
Continues the adventures of Sarny, the slave girl Nightjohn taught to read, through the aftermath of the Civil War during which time she taught other Blacks and lived a full life until age ninety-four. |
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YA
PAU |
Soldier's Heart: A Novel of the Civil War by Gary Paulsen
Eager to enlist, fifteen-year-old Charley has a change of heart after experiencing both the physical horrors and mental anguish of Civil War combat. |
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YA
PECK |
The River Between Us by Richard Peck
Within a page-turning tale of mystery, adventure, and the civilian Civil War experience, a master of stories about people in transition paints a portrait of the lifelong impact that one person can have on another. |
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YA
REES |
Witch Child by Cynthia Rees
In 1659, fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury keeps a journal of her voyage from England to the New World and her experiences living as a witch in a community of Puritans near Salem, Massachusetts. |
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YA
RINALDI |
Girl in Blue by Ann Rinaldi
To escape an abusive father and an arranged marriage, fourteen-year-old Sarah, dressed as a boy, leaves her Michigan home to enlist in the Union Army, and becomes a soldier on the battlefields of Virginia as well as a Union spy working in the house of Confederate sympathizer Rose O'Neal Greenhow in Washington, D.C. |
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YA-PAP
RINALDI |
Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phyllis Wheatley
by Ann Rinaldi
Kidnapped from her home in Senegal and sold as a slave in 1761, a young girl is purchased by the wealthy Wheatley family in Boston. Phillis Wheatley--as she comes to be known--has an eager mind and it leads her on an unusual path for a slave. |
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YA
RINALDI
YA-PAP
RINALDI |
The Second Bend in the River by Ann Rinaldi
In 1798 Rebecca, a young settler in the Ohio territory, meets the Shawnee called Tecumseh and later develops a deep friendship with him. |
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YA
TAYLOR |
The Land by Mildred Taylor
After the Civil War Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother, finds himself caught between the two worlds of colored folks and white folks as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own. |
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| VI. Multicultural |
YA
ALVAREZ |
Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez
In the early 1960s in the Dominican Republic, twelve-year-old Anita learns that her family is involved in the underground movement to end the bloody rule of the dictator, General Trujillo. |
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YA
DISHER |
The Divine Wind: A Love Story by Garry Disher
On the eve of World War II, Hart, an Australian boy and Mitsy, a Japanese-Australian girl, fall in love but are driven apart. |
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YA
MCCAUGHREAN |
The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean
In thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.. |
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YA-PAP
MCCUNN |
The Moon Pearl by RuthAnn Lum McCunn
The uplifting novel of the real heroines of China's Pearl River Delta--young girls who, in the 19th century, fought and won a battle for economic and personal independence that changed the future for thousands of others. |
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YA
WHELAN |
Angel on the Square by Gloria Whelan
It is a golden time for the aristocracy of St. Petersburg in the fall of 1914. The daughter of a lady-in-waiting, Katya Ivanova is safe behind palace walls. But outside the palace, a devastating war sweeps through Europe, and deep unrest takes root in Russia. As the flame of revolution ignites in a country where the rich have always ruled, Katya's once-certain future dissolves. |
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YA
WHELAN |
Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan
In the glorious springtime of 1941 Leningrad seems as though it will always be bright. And then, on June 22nd, Germany turns its forces against its old friend, and all at once Russia is at war. As the enemy army draws closer, winter approaches, and with it will come a darkness and hunger that will stalk the once-luminous city. |
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YA
WHELAN |
Chu Ju's House by Gloria Whelan
When a girl is born to Chu Ju's family, it is quickly determined that the baby must be sent away. After all, the law states that a family may have only two children, and tradition dictates that every family should have a boy. To make room for one, this girl will have to go. Fourteen-year-old Chu Ju knows she cannot allow this to happen to her sister. Understanding that one girl must leave, she sets out in the middle of the night, vowing not to return. |
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YA
WHELAN |
The Impossible Journey by Gloria Whelan
In 1934, thirteen-year-old Marya and her younger brother, Georgi, set out alone on a long and arduous journey into Siberia to find their mother after she and their father are exiled for opposing Stalin. |
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