Books You Might Like:
Historical Fiction
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.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 3.5
The coffin
quilt : the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys by Ann Rinaldi.
In the 1880s,
young Fanny McCoy witnesses the growth of a terrible and violent feud between
her Kentucky family and the West Virginia Hatfields, complicated by her older
sister Roseanna's romance with a Hatfield.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.0
Daniel half
human and the good Nazi by
David
Chotjewitz ; translated by Doris Orgel.
In 1933, best
friends Daniel and Armin admire Hitler, but as anti-Semitism buoys Hitler to
power, Daniel learns he is half Jewish, threatening the friendship even as life
in their beloved Hamburg, Germany, is becoming nightmarish. Also details Daniel
and Armin's reunion in 1945 in interspersed chapters.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.0
How I found
the strong : a Civil War story by Margaret
McMullan.
Frank Russell,
known as Shanks, wishes he could have gone with his father and brother to fight
for Mississippi and the Confederacy, but his experiences with the war and his
changing relationship with the family slave, Buck, change his thinking.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.9
New found land
: a novel by Allan Wolf.
The letters and
thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, members of the Corps of Discovery, their guide
Sacagawea, and Captain Lewis's Newfoundland dog, all tell of the historic
exploratory expedition to seek a water route to the Pacific Ocean.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.5
The teacher's
funeral : a comedy in three parts by
Richard Peck.
In rural Indiana
in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dreams of quitting school and joining a
wheat threshing crew are disrupted when his older sister takes over the
teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls
off and dies."
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.7
Under a
war-torn sky by L.M.
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.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.8
Wild life : a
novel by Molly Gloss.
Charlotte Bridger
Drummond believes she is a fully modern woman, embracing the scientific spirit
that is sweeping the nation in the early 1900s, but when she gets lost while
searching for a missing child, she is thrown into a mysterious world that not
only tests her courage but challenges her entire concept of reality.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 8.4
Daughter of
fortune : a novel by
Isabel Allende
Eliza Sommers,
left alone and pregnant in Chile when her lover Joaquin runs off to California
during the Gold Rush, decides to follow him only to become entranced with her
new life of freedom and independence.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 8.8
Separate
fountains by Patti Wilson
Byars.
A young white
girl chronicles the intertwined lives of herfamily and the family of her
African-American housekeeper, Ardella, in a small town in segregated 1940s and
1950s Georgia. Based on the author's childhood.
Fire in the
rock : a novel by Joe
Martin.
Bo and Pollo,
white and black, watch as their idyllic sixteenth summer turns dark and violent
due to the Jim Crow laws and small-mindedness of the 1950s, and years later
they are forced to confront their shared history in order to save their
friendship.
Four spirits :
a novel by Sena Jeter
Naslund.
Stella Silver, a
white college student, is horrified when she witnesses people from her
Birmingham, Alabama community rejoicing over the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, and is drawn into the struggle for civil rights, which brings her in
touch with people not only of different races, but dangerously different
opinions.
Cane River by Lalita Tademy.
A fact-based
novel in which the author draws upon her own family history to trace four
generations of African-American women from slavery on a Creole plantation to
the pre-civil rights South.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 6.5
Uncommon Faith by Trudy Krisher.
In 1837-38,
residents of Millbrook, Massachusetts, speak in their different voices of major
issues of their day, including women's rights, slavery, religious differences,
and one fiery girl named Faith.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.9
The red dancer
: the life and times of Mata Hari : a novel by Richard Skinner.
Recreates the
life of Margaretha Zelle, a young woman who answered an ad placed by a Dutch
army captain twice her age seeking a wife, and became one of the nineteenth
century's greatest spies.
Room in the
heart by Sonia Levitin.
After German
forces occupy Denmark during World War II, fifteen-year-old Julie Weinstein and
fifteen-year-old Niels Nelson and their friends and families try to cope with
their daily lives, finding various ways to resist the Nazis and, ultimately, to
survive.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.4
The river
between us by Richard
Peck.
During the early
days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies
who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.9
Race for the
sky : the Kitty Hawk diaries of Johnny Moore by Dan Gutman.
Ordered to
practice his writing skills in the blank book his mother gave him,
fourteen-year-old Johnny would rather go fishing near his home on North
Carolina's Outer Banks and cannot think of anything important to write until
two "dingbatters" from Ohio arrive in 1900 and try to build a flying
machine.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.4
Out of the
dust by Karen Hesse.
In a series of
poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her
family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.3
Nowhere to
turn by Alan N. Kay.
In 1862, having
left his uncle's farm in Pennsylvania to join the Union Army, twelve-year-old
Thomas experiences the bloody horror of the Battle of Antietam.
Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen.
Twelve-year-old
Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived
slave offers to teach her how to read.
Accelerated Reader
Reading Level - 3.8
Milkweed : a
novel by Jerry Spinelli.
A street child,
known to himself only as Stopthief, finds community when he is taken in by a
band of orphans in Warsaw ghetto which helps him weather the horrors of the
Nazi regime.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 3.6
Flames of the
tiger by John Wilson.
Dieter grows to
be a young man in Germany believing in the pronouncements and policies of
Hitler and the Nazis, but as World War II intensifies and he is called upon to
fight for his country, Dieter begins to question everything he once believed.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.2
Under a
war-torn sky by L.M.
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.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.8
A traitor
among us by Elizabeth Van
Steenwyk.
In occupied
Holland in 1944, thirteen-year-old Pieter becomes increasingly involved in the
work of the Dutch Resistance even though he knows the risk of being discovered
by the Nazi informer who lives in his village.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.3
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.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 6.3
Or give me
death : a novel of Patrick Henry's family by Ann Rinaldi.
With their father
away most of the time advocating independence for the American colonies, the
children of Patrick Henry try to raise themselves, manage the family
plantation, and care for their mentally ill mother.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 4.0
Forgotten fire by Adam Bagdasarian.
The story of how
Vahan Kenderian survived the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.7
Fielder's
choice : a novel by Rick
Norman.
Jax is a kid who
loves to pitch and for a brief while he realizes his dream of playing in the
pros. Then in 1941, he finds himself in the Army Air Corps and later a prisoner
of war.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 5.3
Cold mountain
: a novel by Charles
Frazier.
Inman, a wounded
Confederate soldier, leaves the hospital where he is being treated and
determines to walk home to his sweetheart Ada, only to find the land and the
girl he remembers as changed by the war as he.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 6.9
Walk the dark
streets : a novel by
Edith Baer.
Continues the
story of Eva, a young Jewish girl living in Nazi Germany where she and her
parents experience increasing tensions in daily life while considering
possibilities of escape.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 8.3
The
charterhouse of Parma by
Stendhal
Presents a 1999
English translation of the nineteenth-century French novel of political
intrigue, following the adventures of Fabrizio del Dongo, a young aristocrat in
Napoleon's army.
Accelerated
Reader Reading Level - 12.0