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.
After social rebels convince the headman of a small village in
Thailand to resist the land rent, his 17-year-old daughter finds
herself caught up in the student uprising in Bangkok.
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.
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 alledged 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.
Left behind when his whole family is arrested by soldiers during the
dark days following the Bolshevik Revolution, 12-year-old Alex falls
in with a gang of other desperate, homeless children.
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.
After her mother is killed while trying to escape across the Berlin
Wall in April 1989, Hannah and her father become caught up in the movement
to change the repressive regime in East Germany.
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.
In 600 A.D. in northern Britain, Prosper becomes a shield bearer with
the Companions, an army made up of three hundred younger sons of minor
kings and trained to act as one fighting brotherhood against the invading
Saxons.
Though reared as a Lenni Lenape Indian, 15-year-old True Son,
once called John Camera Butler, is ordered to return to the white man
despite his having learned intense hatred for the white man.
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.
The story of one day in the life of a young American boy in colonial
Lexington during the Revolutionary War, the day on which he joined the
militia and sees his father shot down by the British.
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.
Fifteen-year-old Jemina of New Jersey, is a member of a family divided
between American patriots and Tories. She is a patriot but what would
happen if she were to fall in love with her Tory tutor?
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 1879, 17-year-old Sarah travels from Chicago to the violent
town of Leadtown, Colorado to search for her missing father, but she finds
that the mention of his name brings her strange looks and an attempt on
her life.
Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing
her to escape from Monticello and all she has ever known, or to stay and
remain a slave.
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.
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.
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.
Sent to America from England at age 7 to escape the war, Rusty
returns five years later to go to a strict English boarding school and
renew her relationship with her family, who now seem like strangers to
her.
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.
