Told from the point of view of the women of Troy, portrays the last weeks of the Trojan War, when women are sick of tending the wounded, men are tired of fighting, and bored gods and goddesses find ways to stir things up.
An orphaned Cro-Magnon child, adopted into a clan of Neanderthal
hunter-gatherers, gradually becomes aware that her survival is linked to
that of humankind.
In two parallel stories, an intelligent female member of a prehistoric
tribe becomes instrumental in advancing the lot of her people, and the
daughter of a paleontologist is visiting him on a dig in Africa when
important fossil remains are discovered.
Although she is a dutiful daughter, Nefertiti's dancing abilities, remarkable beauty, and intelligence garner attention near and far, so much so that her family is summoned to the Egyptian royal court, where Nefertiti becomes a pawn in the power play of her scheming aunt, Queen Tiye.
A special horse named Hosanna changes the lives of two English brothers and those around them as they fight with King Richard I against Saladin's armies during the Third Crusades.
In Iran, more than 100 years ago, a young girl with three suitors gets permission from her father and a holy man to weave into her wedding rug a riddle to be solved by her future husband, which will ensure that he has wit to match hers.
Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.
Amid old secrets revealed and rifts healed, a thirteen-year-old Vietnamese orphan raised in rural France by her aging "Grand-Pierre" learns about her grandfathers role in the Vietnamese war.
In India in the 1940's, 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.
Set in the Dominican Republic, this novel was inspired by the true
story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their
part in an underground plot to overthrow the government.
In the hospital after being beaten by Macoutes, seventeen-year-old
Djo tells his story of working with social reformer Father Aristide to
fight the repression in Haiti.
Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia, Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days of Russian monarchs Nicholas and Alexandra as seen through the eyes of the Romanov’s young kitchen boy, Leonka.
Denied an education because of both her gender and background, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth cuts her hair and alters suits belonging to Will, her wealthy patron's grandnephew, to take his place at school while Will pursues a military career in nineteenth-century England.
In 1413, a young maidservant accompanies her deeply religious mistress, Dame Margery Kempe, on a pilgrimage to Rome. Includes author's note on Kempe, writer of "The Book of Margery Kempe," considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language.
Orphaned by a ninja pirate attack off the coast of Japan in 1611, twelve-year-old English lad Jack Fletcher is determined to prove himself, despite the bullying of fellow students, when the legendary sword master who rescued him begins training him as a samurai warrior.
The "year of wonders" refers to 1666, the year in which an outbreak
of bubonic plague struck England. The novel is a tale of devastation,
grief, and madness as well as the attempts, both medicinal and
spiritual, by the townspeople to combat the disease.
In twelfth-century England, after his master, a maker of coins for the
king, is brutally punished for alleged cheating, 17-year-old
Edmund travels to the Holy Land as a squire to a knight crusader on his
way to join the forces of Richard the Lionheart.
In 1981, the height of Ireland's "Troubles," eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother's hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.
In eighteenth-century Vienna, Austria, fifteen-year-old Theresa seeks a way to help her mother and brother financially while investigating the murder of her father, a renowned violinist in Haydn's orchestra at the court of Prince Esterhazy, after his body is found near a gypsy camp.
During the Spanish Inquisition, sixteen-year-old Estrella, brought up a Catholic, discovers her family's true Jewish identity, and when their secret is betrayed by Estrella's best friend, the consequences are tragic.
In 1650, while Robert, a young medical student, steels himself to assist with her dissection, twenty-two-year-old housemaid Anne Green recalls her life as she lies in her coffin, presumed dead after being hanged for murdering her child that was, in fact, stillborn.
In the violent and predatory world of thirteenth-century Languedoc, Pagan's sixteen-year-old daughter disguises herself as a boy and runs away with a priest who claims to be a friend of her dead father and mother, not knowing whether or not she can trust him, or anyone.
After fighting the infidels in Jerusalem in 1188, Lord Roland and
his squire Pagan return to Roland's castle in France where they
encounter violent family feuds and religious heretics.
Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls where she is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant's home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.
Catharine Howard recounts the events in her life that led to her being groomed for marriage at the age of fifteen to King Henry VIII, her failure to produce an heir to the throne, and her quick execution.
In eighteenth-century France, Marie-Antoinette rails against the rules of etiquette that govern her life even as she tries to fulfill her greatest obligation, giving birth to the next king, but she finds diversion in spending money on clothing, parties, and gambling despite her family's warnings and the whispers of courtiers.
In Renaissance Italy, Elisabetta longs for romance, and when Leonardo da Vinci introduces her to Guiliano de Medici, whose family rules Florence but is about to be deposed, she has no inkling of the romance--and sorrow--that will ensue.
In 1882, 16-year-old Becky applies for a tutoring job in London
and becomes embroiled in assassination, intrigue and dangerous politics in
the small European kingdom of Razkavia.
Violetta and Feste have come to London to rescue a holy relic taken from a church in Illyria by the evil Malvolio, and once there, they tell the story of their adventures to playwright William Shakespeare, who turns it into a play.
When her village is attacked and burned, Gwyna seeks protection from the bard Myrddin, who uses Gwyna in his plan to transform young Arthur into the heroic King Arthur.
Despite being the son of a chieftain and a princess, fourteen-year-old Halfdan lives as a slave in Denmark in A.D. 845 but through a tragic bargain he gains his freedom and sets out to claim his birthright.
Alaskans Luke, Chickie, Sonny, Donna, and Amiq relate their experiences in the early 1960s when they are forced to attend a Catholic boarding school where, despite different tribal affiliations, they come to find a sort of family and home.
In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook learns about
perseverance and self-reliance when she is separated from her mother and
forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.
Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
Fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury keeps a journal of her voyage from
England to the New World and her experiences living as a witch in a
community of Puritans near Salem, Massachusetts.
Two fifteen-year-old girls--one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.
The glory, the horror, the thrill, and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War is described in the voices of Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters.
In Manhattan in 1899, five teens of different social classes lead dangerously scandalous lives, despite the strict rules of society and the best-laid plans of parents and others.
Emma has taken care of the Butler children since Sarah and Frances's mother, Fanny, left. Emma wants to raise the girls to have good hearts, as a rift over slavery has ripped the Butler household apart. Now, to pay off debts, Pierce Butler wants to cash in his slave "assets", possibly including Emma.
In 1863, fifteen-year-old Claire, the daughter of an Irish mother and a black father, faces ugly truths and great danger when Irish immigrants, enraged by the Civil War and a federal draft, lash out against blacks and wealthy "swells" of New York City.
Fourteen-year-old Calogero Scalise and his Sicilian uncles and cousin live in small-town Louisiana in 1898, when Jim Crow laws rule and anti-immigration sentiment is strong, so despite his attempts to be polite and to follow American customs, disaster dogs his family at every turn.
As the Civil War breaks out, India, a young Southern girl, summons her sharp intelligence and the courage she didn't know she had to survive the war that threatens to destroy her family, her Virginia home, and the only life she has ever known.
In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. A Newberry Award Winner.
In 1923 Chicago, seventeen-year-old Gloria Carmody rebels against her upcoming society wedding by visiting a speakeasy, while her Pennsylvania cousin, Clara, hides similar tastes and her best friend, Lorraine, makes plans of her own.
After inheriting her uncle's homesteading claim in Montana, sixteen-year-old orphan Hattie Brooks travels from Iowa in 1917 to make a home for herself and encounters some unexpected problems related to the war being fought in Europe.
In 1968 Chicago, fourteen-year-old Sam Childs is caught in a conflict between his father's nonviolent approach to seeking civil rights for African Americans and his older brother, who has joined the Black Panther Party.
A forbidden friendship with a badly disfigured soldier in the
aftermath of World War I forces 13-year-old Annie to redefine the
word "hero" and to question conventional ideas of patriotism.
Now an old man, John is haunted by memories of enlisting to fight in
World War II, a decision which forced him to face the horrors of war and
changed his life forever.
During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.
In 1947, with her jovial stepfather Joe back from the war and family life returning to normal, teenage Evie, smitten by the handsome young ex-GI who seems to have a secret hold on Joe, finds herself caught in a complicated web of lies whose devastating outcome change her life and that of her family forever.
In October, 1942, seventeen-year-old Helmuth Hübener, imprisoned for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, recalls his past life and how he came to dedicate himself to bring the truth about Hitler and the war to the German people.
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.
Thirteen-year-old Hella discovers that the man posing as her father is
really a Nazi war criminal who is using her to slip by the military police
following world War II.
In 1938, Edith Westerfeld, a young German Jew, is sent by her parents to Chicago, Illinois, where she lives with an aunt and uncle and tries to assimilate into American culture, while worrying about her parents and mourning the loss of everything she has ever known.
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.
Teens Octavia and Tali learn about strength, independence, and courage when they are forced to take a car trip with their grandmother, who tells about growing up Black in 1940s Alabama and serving in Europe during World War II as a member of the Women's Army Corps.
A dramatic and ambitious companion to The Diary of Anne Frank, this fictionalized account of the two Jewish families in hiding is told from the point of view of Anne's companion in the secret annex, 15-year-old Peter van Pels.
After living in an Catholic orphanage for nearly four years, a naive Jewish boy runs away and embarks on a journey across Nazi-occupied Poland to find his parents.
Moshe Wisniak, a poor Polish Jew, uses his physical strength and cleverness, plus luck, to help him survive the horrors he is subjected to in the concentration camps of World War II. Based on the life of Moshè Garbarz.
The first of a trilogy, this stirring graphic novel set in 1940 in the French countryside authentically expresses the personal standoffs and immediate drama of children who are drawn into the Resistance when German soldiers occupy their village.
A mesmerizing novel based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved and succored more than 1000 Jews from the Nazis at enormous financial and emotional expense.
When Johanna travels to Israel for a class project, she discovers that her family's clothing store was obtained by her grandfather under the anti-Semitic laws of the Third Reich.
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv' roundup.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past.
He's a boy who lives in the streets of Warsaw. He's a boy who steals food for himself and the other orphans. He's a boy who believes in bread, and mothers, and angels.And when the trains come to empty the Jews from the ghetto of the damned, he's a boy who realizes it's safest of all to be nobody.
Wiesel's account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps, including a new preface is which he reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Rebecca has always loved listening to her grandmother's stories about Briar Rose. However, the old woman's astonishing and hard-to-believe admission that she "is" Briar Rose sets Rebecca on an unforgettable path of self-discovery that will change her life forever.
At nine years old, Liesel Meminger is taken from her mother to live with a foster family in Molching, Germany during Hitler's rise to power. Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. Death is the narrator in this story about the ability of books to feed the soul.
