Historical Fiction genre
After her mother’s suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother’s family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.
A story about the end of communist rule in Romania and the beginning of the revolution for freedom is seen through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Flora Popescu.
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 belief 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 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: abused by her alcoholic father and separated from her beloved baby sister, she is as bound up in the tragedy of the times as is Morris. The book 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 year is 1783. On a cozy French farm, there lives a sheep with an impossible dream: She wants to fly. Mouton’s friend Canard the duck is sympathetic, but Cocorico the rooster insists that, without wings, Mouton will never take off. Still, Mouton is full of hope and determination—perhaps just enough to make her impossible dream come true.
Ten-year-old Solomon Snow, a foundling who was discovered with a distinctive silver spoon in his mouth, sets out to find his parents and receives help along the way from an aspiring writer, a precocious young circus performer, and several orphans.
In Restoration London, sixteen-year-old Meg Moore spends long hours conversing with the famous authors and poets who visit her father’s bookstore, and even writes her own stories. Without warning, however, Meg comes to learn exactly how powerful words can be. The day her best friend’s brother Edward sets sail for Italy, Meg scoffs at his attempts at romance by answering him with a thoughtless jest. Soon news travels to London that
Edward’s ship has been captured and he has been sold as a slave in North Africa – and Meg cannot shake the thought that her cruel words are the cause. Now Meg must use her fiery language to bring Edward home, imploring her fellow Londoners to give all that they can to buy Edward’s freedom. But once Meg learns to direct the power behind her words, will she be able to undo the damage she has caused, and write freely the stories that she longs to put to paper? This sequel to At the Sign of the Star continues Meg’s story.
The author of So Far from the Bamboo Grove continues her semi-autobiographical fiction, describing the hardships, poverty, tragedies, and struggles of life for her and her two older brother and sister, living in post-World War II (1947) Japan.
In 1264, Jean of Toulouse, a young French student and friar accused of heresy by the Inquisition, is sent to Oxford to spy on the scholarly monk, Roger Bacon, who is suspected of being a heretic for his advanced scientific ideas.
In 1989, when fifteen-year-old Jude’s mother wins a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Czechoslovakia, the family postpones a planned move to Utah to join her, but the political situation and the move itself are too much for Jude, who is overwhelmed by a previously undiagnosed psychological disorder.
Young Jane — or Jenny, as she is called — is a girl with a head full of questions. Surrounded by her busy parents and brothers, Jenny finds a place for her thoughts in the companionship of her older sister, Cassandra. Theirs is a country life full of balls and visits, at which conversation inevitably centers on one topic: marriage. But the arrival of their worldly-wise cousin Eliza disrupts Jenny’s world, bringing answers to some of her questions and providing a gem of an idea.