The Rope Trick

Lloyd Alexander

Motivated by her quest to learn a legendary rope trick, the magician Princess Lidi and her troupe embark on a journey through Renaissance Italy that intertwines adventure, love, and mystery.

Chains

Laurie Halse Anderson

As the Revolutionary War gets underway, thirteen-year-old Isabel and her sister Ruth become the slaves of a New York City couple, despite being promised freedom upon the death of their old owner. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, however, he persuades her to spy on her new owners, who have ties to the British and may know when and how the British are planning to invade.

Don't You Know There's a War On?

Avi

In wartime Brooklyn in 1943, eleven-year-old Howie Crispers mounts a campaign to save his favorite teacher from being fired.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

John Boyne

Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called "Out-With" in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence.

Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two

Joseph Bruchac

After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.

Al Capone Does My Shirts

Gennifer Choldenko

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi

David Chotjewitz

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.

The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963

Christopher Paul Curtis

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

A Troubled Peace

L.M. Elliott

Nineteen-year-old pilot Henry Forester, having returned home to Virginia after fighting in World War II, is consumed by worry over the well-being of the people who helped him escape Nazi-occupied Germany and returns to France, where he is shocked to see the ravages of war and tries to regain internal peace.

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba

Margarita Engle

Escaping from Nazi Germany to Cuba in 1939, a young Jewish refugee dreams of finding his parents again, befriends a local girl with painful secrets of her own, and discovers that the Nazi darkness is never far away.

Bridge to America

Linda Glaser

Eight-year-old Fivel narrates the story of his family's Atlantic Ocean crossing to reunite with their father in the United States, from its desperate beginning in a shtetl in Poland in 1920 to his stirrings of identity as an American boy.

How I Became an American

Karin Gündisch

In 1902, ten-year-old Johann and his family, Germans who had been living in Austria-Hungary, board a ship to immigrate to Youngstown, Ohio, where they make a new life as Americans.

Joshua's Song

Joan Hiatt Harlow

Needing to earn money after his father's death during the influenza epidemic of 1918, thirteen-year-old Joshua works as a newspaper boy in Boston, one day finding himself in the vicinity of an explosion that sends tons of molasses coursing through the streets.

The Grave

James Heneghan

Thirteen-year-old Tom, an unhappy foster child in Liverpool, falls into a massive open grave and is transported to Ireland in 1847, where he finds himself in the midst of the deadly potato famine.

Brooklyn Bridge

Karen Hesse

Fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom's life takes a dramatic turn when, in 1903 Brooklyn, his parents turn their apartment into a factory for making teddy bears; and Joseph wonders whether he will ever see the glitter of Coney Island.

Weedflower

Cynthia Kadohata

After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop.

Back Home

Julia Keller

Thirteen-year-old Rachel Browning understands that her father will be different after being injured in the Iraq War, but no one is prepared for the impact that his traumatic brain injury and other wounds have on the entire family.

Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial

Ronald Kidd

When her father hatches a plan to bring publicity to their small Tennessee town by arresting a local high school teacher for teaching about evolution, the resulting 1925 Scopes trial prompts fifteen-year-old Frances to rethink many of her beliefs about religion and truth, as well as her relationship with her father.

Blood Secret

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.

Henry's Freedom Box

Ellen Levine

A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.

The Kite Rider

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.

Baseball Saved Us

Ken Mochizuki

A Japanese American boy learns to play baseball when he and his family are forced to live in an internment camp during World War II, and his ability to play helps him after the war is over.

Private Peaceful

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.

Harlem Summer

Walter Dean Myers

In 1920s Harlem, sixteen-year-old saxophonist Mark Purvis struggles to advance his jazz career while working as a gopher for the new Africa-American magazine, "The Crisis," and becoming involved with mobster Dutch Schultz.

A Single Shard

Linda Sue Park

Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself.

When My name was Keoko

Linda Sue Park

With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

Tamar

Mal Peet

In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.

The Desperado Who Stole Baseball

John H. Ritter

In 1881, the scrappy, rough-and-tumble baseball team in a California mining town enlists the help of a quick-witted twelve-year-old orphan and the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid to win a big game against the National League Champion Chicago White Stockings.

Esperanza Rising

Pam Muñoz Ryan

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

Keeping Corner

Kashmira Sheth

In India in the 1940s, thirteen-year-old Leela's happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi's social and political reforms.

Blue Fingers: A Ninja's Tale

Cheryl Aylward Whitesel

Having failed apprenticeship as a dye maker, Koji is captured and forced to train as a ninja, where he remains disloyal until he discovers samurai have burned his former village

Counting on Grace

Elizabeth Winthrop

It's 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend Arthur must leave school to work in the mill. They write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about children working in the mill. A few weeks later, Lewis Hine, a famous reformer, arrives to gather evidence. Grace meets him and appears in some of his photographs, changing her life forever.

Good Night, Maman

Norma Fox Mazer