Book Recommendations: Historical Fiction

In this reimagining of The Arabian Nights, Shahrzad plans to avenge the death of her dearest friend by volunteering to marry the murderous boy-king of Khorasan but discovers not all is as it seems within the palace.

Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War. 'Includes a character glossary.

When Attia is sold as a slave to the House of Timeus, no one knows she's actually the warrior princess of Thrace, and the last of her people. She is given to Xanthus, a fellow slave and gladiator champion of Rome, as a gift from his master. Attia and Xanthus begin to build a trust through their shared skill in combat and a driving desire to seek revenge on the Roman leaders who wiped out their respective homes. While their burgeoning love leaves them both with something to lose, Attia never takes her eyes off her goal of vengeance.

Essie, a young black woman in 1880s Savannah, is offered the opportunity to leave her shameful past and be transformed into an educated, high-society woman in Washington, D.C.&site=100

Lady Victoria Aston, obsessed with Jane Austen and content to stay home, is suddenly expected to enter society and find a husband, preferably one who cares for her more than her dowry.

Inspired by the true story of the last American slave ship, African Town is an epic novel in verse told from multiple first-person points of view.

In 1845, Sammy, a Chinese American girl, and Annamae, an African American slave girl, disguise themselves as boys and travel on the Oregon Trail to California from Missouri.

Audrey Rose Wadsworth, a highborn Victorian young lady, is determined to understand the nature of death after her own mother's death and as she is secretly apprenticing in forensics she finds herself embroiled in the investigation of serial killer Jack the Ripper.

At the Freedman's Colony of Roanoke Island, a haven for the recently emancipated, the four March sisters--Meg, Joanna, Bethlehem, and Amethyst--come into their own as independent young Black women together facing love, sickness, heartbreak, and new horizons.

In 1893 Chicago, after his best friend becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, Alter Rosen is plunged into a nightmare where he is thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past.

In 1841, rescued by an American whaler after a terrible shipwreck leaves him and his four companions castaways on a remote island, fourteen-year-old Manjiro, who dreams of becoming a samurai, learns new laws and customs as he becomes the first Japanese person to set foot in the United States.

Hazel Sinnett is a medical student in 19th century Scotland who, after being kicked out because of her gender, works with new attractive acquaintance Jack Currer to procure dead bodies to study, but they soon discover secrets buried in the heart of Edinburgh society.

A Choctaw boy tells the story of his tribe's removal from the only land its people had ever known, and how their journey to Oklahoma led him to become a ghost--one with the ability to help those he left behind.

Growing up together in the community of Japantown, San Francisco, fourteen second-generation Japanese American teens find their bond tested by widespread discrimination and the mass incarcerations of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

It is June 6, 1944, D-Day, and Dee Carpenter (true name Dietrich Zimmermann), an underage private in the United States Army, is headed for Omaha Beach, seeking revenge for his uncle, who was arrested by Nazis when Dee was a little boy; meanwhile, Samira Zidano, an eleven-year old French-Algerian girl is looking for the French resistance, desperate to deliver the message that the invasion is about to begin, and get their help in freeing her mother--this is the most important day of the twentieth century, and both children want to fight, and survive.

Forced into an internment camp at the start of World War II, eighteen-year-old Yuki enlists in the Army to fight for the Allies as a member of the "Four-Four-Two," a segregated Japanese American regiment.

Follows Dita Kraus from age fourteen, when she is put in charge of a few forbidden books at Auschwitz concentration camp, through the end of World War II and beyond. Based on a true story.

In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note.

Seventeen-year-old Kettle, an orphaned Japanese American who has had his share of adversity due to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, feels like his life is getting better as he secures a job and finds a place among a group of boys living in an abandoned subway tunnel. But, things get complicated when he meets Nora, the eighteen-year-old privileged daughter of an abusive civil rights lawyer who is working on a compensation case for the interned people.

The daughter of a prominent samurai in feudal Japan is targeted by a dangerous gang of bandits who want to prevent her political marriage, a situation that compels her to disguise herself as a boy and infiltrate the gang's ranks in order to stop the individual behind the plot.

In mid-thirteenth century Provence, Dolssa de Stigata is a fervently religious girl who feels the call to preach, condemned by the Inquisition as an "unnatural woman," and hunted by the Dominican Friar Lucien who fears a resurgence of the Albigensian heresy; Botille is a matchmaker trying to protect her sisters from being branded as gypsies or witches--but when she finds the hunted Dolssa dying on a hillside, she feels compelled to protect her, a decision that may cost her everything.

Two star-crossed assassins in Elizabethan England must go undercover as actors in one of William Shakespeare's plays in a plot to kill the queen.

In 1426 in Joseon, a year after her father vanishes while investigating the disappearance of thirteen girls, eighteen-year-old Min Hwani returns to the island of Jeju to pick up his trail with the help of her estranged sister.

In Renaissance Italy, Artemisia Gentileschi endures the subjugation of women that allows her father to take credit for her extraordinary paintings, rape and the ensuing trial, and torture, buoyed by her deceased mother's stories of strong women of the Bible.

In this first book in a trilogy a girl child is born to Vlad Dracula, in Transylvania, in 1435--at first rejected by her father and always ignored by her mother, she will grow up to be Lada Dragwlya, a vicious and brutal princess, destined to rule and destroy her enemies.

Savannah Riddle feels suffocated by her life as the daughter of an upper class African American family in Washington, D.C., until she meets a working-class girl named Nella who introduces her to the suffragette and socialist movements and to her politically active cousin Lloyd.

A historical fiction novel in verse detailing the life of Clara Lemlich and her struggle for women's labor rights in the early 20th century in New York.

In 1926 Shanghai, eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, heir of the Scarlet Gang, and her first love-turned-rival Roma Montagov, leader of the White Flowers, must work together when mysterious deaths threaten their city.

On the eve of the San Fransisco Earthquake of 1906, Mercy Wong--daughter of Chinese immigrants--is struggling to hold her own among the spoiled heiresses at prestigious St. Clare's School. When tragedy strikes, everyone must band together to survive.

fter smuggling herself onto the RMS Titanic, British-Chinese teenager Valora Luck reunites with her twin brother and tries to convince him that their acrobatic training could be their ticket to a better life.

Set during the height of the Russian Revolution and told in alternating voices, sixteen-year-old Evgenia--a peasant and proud member of the Bolshevik party--agrees to help a seventeen-year-old bourgeois girl traverse the war-torn countryside in search of safety, but Anna is harboring a secret that could cost them their lives.

Angel and Isaiah share a hidden love for black literature, and now each other, when tragedy and triumph emerge during the Greenwood Massacre of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself--because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of--a woman with a future.

Inspired by a true story, this relates the tale of siblings Sosi, Shahen, and Mariam who survive the Armenian genocide of 1915 by escaping from Turkey alone over the mountains.

A sixteen-year-old biracial girl in rural Oregon in the 1920s searches for the truth about her father's death while avoiding trouble from the Ku Klux Klan in this YA historical novel inspired by Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.'

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.

Written in verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Virginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.

While in Charlestown Prison in the 1940s, young Malcolm Little reads all the books in the library, joins the debate team and the Nation of Islam, and emerges as Malcolm X.

n 1959 Virginia, Linda Hairston, who has been taught all her life that the races should be kept "separate but equal," must work on a school project with Sarah Dunbar, one of the first African-American students at the all-white Jefferson High School.

When Alex and Eliza meet one fateful night, so begins an epic love story that would forever change the course of American history.

An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy--Louis Charles, the lost king of France.

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.

A young bisexual British lord embarks on an unforgettable Grand Tour of Europe with his best friend/secret crush. An 18th-century romantic adventure for the modern age.

Moa, a fourteen-year-old slave, works on the Frontier sugarcane plantation for endless hot days. Then one night he learns of an uprising. Moa is to be a cane warrior in the most significant slave rebellion in Jamaican history. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson.

1954, in San Francisco's Chinatown, seventeen-year-old Lily Hu falls in love with Kathleen Miller.

Loosely based on a school explosion that took place in New London, Texas, in 1937, this is the story of two teenagers: Naomi, who is Mexican, and Wash, who is black, and their dealings with race, segregation, love, and the forces that destroy people.

Josie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a French Quarter prostitute, is striving to escape 1950 New Orleans and enroll at prestigious Smith College when she becomes entangled in a murder investigation.

When resentment surges during the Great Depression in a Texas border town, Estrella, fifteen, organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos and soon finds herself witih her mother and baby brother in Mexico.

Lewis "Shoe" Blake from the Tuscarora Reservation has a new friend, George Haddonfield from the local Air Force base, but in 1975 upstate New York there is a lot of tension and hatred between Native Americans and Whites--and Lewis is not sure that he can rely on friendship.

Growing up in Alaska in the 1970s isn't like growing up anywhere else: Don't think life is going to be easy. Know your place. And never talk about yourself. Four vivid voices tell intertwining stories of hardship, tragedy, wild luck, and salvation.

In this gender-flipping reimagining of S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders" set in 1964 Houston, Evie must redefine what it means to be a bad girl and rethink everything she knows about loyalty after she is saved from the unimaginable by a good girl from the "right" side of the tracks.

During the summer of 1977 when New York City is besieged by arson, a massive blackout, and a serial killer named Son of Sam, seventeen-year-old Nora must also face her family's financial woes, her father's absence, and her brother's growing violence.

In the summer of 1972, three girls from very different backgrounds struggle to come to terms with being pregnant.

In Colorado in 1962 the three teenage Soria cousins run an unlicensed radio station from a beat-up box truck converted into a transmitter; Beatriz is the thinker and technician, Joaquin, the youngest, is the disc jockey, and Daniel is called the Saint ofBicho Raro because he can perform miracles (just not for himself)--then one night Pete Wyatt and Tony DiRisio drive into town in search of a miracle.

Told from different points of view--protesters, students, National Guardsmen, and "townies"--recounts the story of what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when four college students were killed by National Guardsmen, and a student protest was turned into a bloody battlefield.

Emma gets her first computer and an America Online CD-ROM in 1996, and when her best friend Josh visits and they log on, they discover themselves on Facebook fifteen years in the future.

With the Rodney King riots closing in on high school senior Ashley and her family, the privileged bubble she has enjoyed, protecting her from the difficult realities most black people face, begins to crumble.

Julie'sfamily life is routine and boring, and no one tal ks about her older brother, a one-time Olympic-hopeful swimmer who now lives in Berlin. Julie never consideredjoining the swim team, until Alexis, the girls' team captain, tries to recruit her. It's a dare, and a flirtation -- and a chance for Julie to find her brother, or to finally let him go.

A Vietnam War refugee in Texas partners with a rodeo aspirant to track down the younger brother she was forced to leave behind before discovering that he no longer remembers her.

High school senior Lei unexpectedly finds love amid the student protests in Beijing in 1989, forcing her to choose between her family and its legacy or her future with a revolutionary leader.

An Iranian youth who hides his sexual orientation from his family, an openly gay photographer and an aspiring fashion designer with an HIV-positive uncle fall in love and find their voices as activists during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City.

After their friend Steph is murdered, Quadir, Jarrell, and Steph's sister Jasmine promote his music under a new rap name, the Architect, but when his demo catches a music label rep's attention, the trio must prove his talent from beyond the grave.