Historical Fiction genre
It’s June A.D. 80. Everyone is thinking about love at the lavish Villa Limona, where friends Flavia, Jonathan, Lupus, and Nubia have come to visit for the summer. But their host suspects that there’s a poisoner among the houseguests, and the friends are asked to investigate.
Charlie’s father is dead, and although his mother insists he stay in school, Charlie has no patience for the classroom. All he wants is to make money, to give his mother and baby brother a better life. So when he catches the eye of Squizzy Taylor, a notorious mobster, and is offered a job as Squizzy’s courier, it doesn’t take Charlie long to accept—even if he has to go against his own mother’s wishes. At first, the job’s a thrill—running with messages, illegal liquor, whatever Squizzy orders. It fills Charlie with power. But then come the not-so-savory parts of the job. Collecting Squizzy’s debts. Dodging Squizzy’s enemies. The very real dangers of the streets. And at some point Charlie has to ask himself—how long before running for a better life means cutting his life short?
Ireland, 1984. After Shell’s mother dies, her obsessively religious father descends into alcoholic mourning, and Shell is left to care for her younger brother and sister. Her only release from the harshness of everyday life comes from her budding spiritual friendship with a naive young priest, and most importantly, her developing relationship with childhood friend, Declan, who is charming, eloquent and persuasive. But when Declan suddenly leaves Ireland to seek his fortune in America, Shell finds herself pregnant and the center of a scandal that rocks the small community in which she lives, with repercussions across the whole country. The lives of those immediately around her will never be the same again.
During the closing months of World War II, a fifteen-year-old German girl must decide whether or not to help an escaped Russian prisoner of war, despite the serious consequences if she does so.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 3, Issue 4
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel — a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
Awards
USBBY Honor Book
Take a closer look at The Book Thief as examined in WOW Review.
Eight-year-old Jeanne was the only one of her family to survive the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Then a German family adopted her, and her adoptive mother now tells Jeanne’s story in a compelling fictionalized biography that stays true to the traumatized child’s bewildered viewpoint.
Featured in Volume I, Issue 4 of WOW Review.
In 1993, as Hitler becomes Chancellor, twelve-year-old Erich and his family, who are Jewish, find they need to make changes in their everyday lives as hatred of the Jews grows.
Having always been able to know when someone is going to die, Alexandra poses as a nurse to go to France during World War I to locate her brother and to try to save him from the fate she has foreseen for him.
Three sisters growing up in post-World War II Sydney, Australia, deal with their mentally unstable father, their possibly unfaithful mother, and the defecting Russian spy who lives next door.
London, 1830s, 12-year-old Victor, an orphan, knows from experience that life is dangerous, and death by disease or accident is common. But to Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs, these streets -teeming with the poor and forgotten are a paradise. They know that a child, once dead, is a commodity, and they are growing impatient.