It’s the early half of the 19th century in coastal Nova Scotia, and almost-ten-year-old Ellie is adjusting to the recent death of her mother. But just when she finally begins to feel happy again, Ellie and her father move to remote Sable Island, a tiny, windblown crescent of grass and sand in the Atlantic. While her father works, Ellie explores the island, feeling alone and furious with her pa for making them leave their beloved home. Even meeting a spirited island girl named Sarah does little to dispel her anger and grief. Then one afternoon, Ellie encounters a wild stallion grazing on the dunes, and slowly forges a secret connection with the beautiful horse she names Orchid. But Ellie soon learns that Orchid and his family are threatened, and it may be up to her to save them. Based on historical fact, this early chapter book is a touching exploration of loss and loneliness and the redemptive power of love and friendship.
Historical Fiction
Historical Fiction genre
Spirit’s Princess
In ancient Japan, Himiko, the privileged daughter of her clan’s leader, fights the constraints and expectations imposed on young women and finds her own path, which includes secret shaman lessons.
Cross My Heart
When Laura della Scala’s older sister drowns, Laura leaves the shelter of the convent where she has spent the last six years and enters the upper echelons of sixteenth-century Venetian society, while she searches for the truth about what happened to her sister.
Gladiator: Fight for Freedom
After Marcus Cornelius Primus’s father is murdered and his mother kidnapped and enslaved, Marcus is forced to fight as a gladiator, enduring years of brutal training while he secretly plots to avenge his father’s death and rescue his mother.
Michael at the Invasion of France 1943
When the Nazis invade Paris, Michael, a thirteen-year- old French-American, wants to be a part of the Resistance. Starting small, vandalizing Nazi propaganda and refusing to hail Hitler, Michael works his way into the full-blown Resistance, escorting American aviators to safe zones and delivering important spy documents. But when an injured pilot needs help to escape France, will Michael be brave enough to complete the mission? With historical notes, time lines, and maps to augment the page-turning action, it’s easy to see why School Library Journal says Boys of Wartime “will appeal to history buffs and reluctant readers alike.”
Puppet
A heartbreaking episode in history, explained through the story of a young servant girl in the late 1800s. The year is 1882. A young servant girl named Esther disappears from a small Hungarian village. Several Jewish men from the village of Tisza Eszvar face the ‘blood libel’ — the centuries-old calumny that Jews murder Christian children for their blood. A fourteen-year-old Jewish boy named Morris Scharf becomes the star witness of corrupt authorities who coerce him into testifying against his fellow Jews, including his own father, at the trial.
This powerful fictionalized account of one of the last blood libel trial in Europe is told through the eyes of Julie, a friend of the murdered Esther, and a servant at the jail where Morris is imprisoned. Julie is no stranger to suffering herself. An abused child, when her mother dies her alcoholic father separates her from her beloved baby sister. Julie and Morris, bound by the tragedy of the times, become unlikely allies. The novel is based upon a real court case that took place in Hungary in 1883. In Hungary today, the name Morris Scharf has become synonymous with “traitor.”
The Wild Book
Fefa struggles with words. She has word blindness, or dyslexia, and the doctor says she will never read or write. Every time she tries, the letters jumble and spill off the page, leaping and hopping away like bullfrogs. How will she ever understand them? But her mother has an idea. She gives Fefa a blank book filled with clean white pages. “Think of it as a garden,” she says. Soon Fefa starts to sprinkle words across the pages of her wild book. She lets her words sprout like seedlings, shaky at first, then growing stronger and surer with each new day. And when her family is threatened, it is what Fefa has learned from her wild book that saves them.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 3
Horton Halfpott
Tom Angleberger’s latest, loopiest middle-grade novel begins when M’Lady Luggertuck loosens her corset (it’s never been loosened before!), thereby setting off a chain of events in which all the strict rules of Smugwick Manor are abandoned. When, as a result of “the Loosening,” the precious family heirloom, the Luggertuck Lump (quite literally a lump), goes missing, the Luggertucks look for someone to blame. Is it Horton Halfpott, the good-natured but lowly kitchen boy who can’t tell a lie? Or one of the many colorful cast members in this silly romp of a mystery.
Breaking Stalin’s Nose
In the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, 10-year-old Sasha idolizes his father, a devoted Communist, but when police take his father away and leave Sasha homeless, he is forced to examine his own perceptions, values and beliefs.
Ghost Hands
Auki, a young member of the Tehuelche tribe in Patagonia, wants to prove himself as a hunter but when he sets out on his own to face the puma, he stumbles upon a sacred cave and its guardian.