Historical Fiction genre
In July 1944, as the Red Army drives the Nazis out of Poland, sixteen-year-old Maria Kamińska must work with a captured Ukrainian nationalist to find her brother, who is a special operations agent and leader of a Polish Resistance squad, when he disappears while on a mission.
“In this sequel to Evangelina Takes Flight, the young girl who left her home during the Mexican Revolution to start over in a small Texas border town is now seventeen. She has had several years of medical training with her mentor, Doc Taylor, but when a doctor from a neighboring town finds her helping an Anglo woman in labor, he is enraged. He calls her a dirty Mexican and kicks her out. The next day, Evangelina is arrested for murder. The racist sheriff and many of the townspeople believe Mexicans are inferior and that Evangelina must be guilty of using witchcraft to kill the pregnant woman. But she isn’t all alone. Doc Taylor believes in her innocence, as does Cora Cavanaugh, the spirited daughter of a wealthy businessman. And there’s Selim Njaim, a young Muslim with whom she has a forbidden relationship. Soon La Liga Protectora Mexicana assigns someone to represent her, but will Joaquín Castañeda be able to convince the jury that Evangelina is not a murderer? Set in Texas in 1915, this eye-opening historical novel for young adults reveals the racial inequity in the justice system, the discrimination experienced by Mexicans and other non-whites and the limitations placed on women. Teens will relate to the theme of finding confidence and bravery in times of uncertainty, while learning about the harassment, torture and killing of innocent Mexicans and Tejanos in the early part of the twentieth century.”
When sickness decimates his fishing village, an orphan named Leif flees north in a cedar canoe, journeying along a brutal but beautiful coastline.
Set during the height of the Russian Revolution and told in alternating voices, sixteen-year-old Evgenia–a peasant and proud member of the Bolshevik party–agrees to help a seventeen-year-old bourgeois girl traverse the war-torn countryside in search of safety, but Anna is harboring a secret that could cost them their lives. Includes historical note and author’s note.
Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse.
In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they’d been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.
Nina, a young girl unsure of her role in her communist society, befriends a dog named Laika, who dreams of finding a home and is being studied in Nina’s father’s lab as part of the Soviet space program.
In 1852, during the height of the California Gold Rush, ten-year-old Wong makes the dangerous trip to America to live with his uncle, exchanging the famine and war of his native country for brutal bullies and grueling labor in America, Wong joins his uncle and countless others in the effort to strike it rich on the great Golden Mountain. Unfortunately, he, and most of the rest of the dreamers, soon discover that there’s no such thing as a Golden Mountain, only dirt, mud, and occasionally tiny flecks of gold dust flecks that are to be turned over to the owners of the mines, in return for barely livable wages. However, someone as clever and resourceful as Wong will have to find other ingenious ways of making money if they’re going to make it in America. But can they overcome the bitter, racist white Americans to find success?
When nine-year-old Li, her mother, and brother Puck arrive from China at Angel Island immigration center in 1921, Li fears she will be deported for failing the tests. Includes historical notes and glossary.
Ten ghost stories about Chinese people who, having come to North America to make their fortunes, encounter ghosts who either help or hinder their success.
When hard times fall on his family, Jo Lee is sent from China to San Francisco, where he helps his uncle fish and dreams of being reunited with his mother and sister.