Historical Fiction

What is Historical Fiction? Characteristics Historical fiction is set in a time far enough away from the present to be considered history. Story is imaginary but could be possible and is constructed around actual historical facts. Brings history to life by putting appealing characters in accurate historical settings. Tells stories of characters’ everyday lives as well as their triumphs and failures. Makes history more real and more memorable.

Released from an Oklahoma state prison after serving four years for a manslaughter conviction, Tom Joad makes his way back to his family’s farm in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl/Great Depression.

Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret.

In wartime Brooklyn in 1943, eleven-year-old Howie Crispers mounts a campaign to save his favorite teacher from being fired.

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.

Nine-year-old Claudia and ten-year-old Frieda MacTeer live in Lorain, Ohio, with their parents. It is the end of the Great Depression. The MacTeers take in a boarder, a young girl named Pecola. Pecola loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that she is ugly.

A fictionalized account of the Pakistani child who escaped from bondage in a carpet factory and went on to help liberate other children like him before being gunned down at the age of thirteen.

Sara is ten years old, the daughter of Russians who came to America in search of a better life. The family lives in New York. The parents are Reb and Shenah Smolinsky. Reb is a religious man that arranges his daughter’s marriages.

Rifka, a young Jewish girl, writes to her cousin, chronicling her family's experiences fleeing Russia in 1919, and her own trials after being left in Belgium on her own while the others emigrate to America.

Story of an African-American family living in Mississippi during the Depression of the 1930s, whose children do not understand the prejudice and discrimination aimed at them.

Philip, an adolescent white boy who is blinded in a torpedo attack at sea during World War II, acquires a new type of vision, courage, and love when he is stranded on a tiny Caribbean island with Timothy, a kind, elderly black man.

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

As English armies invade Scotland in 1306, eleven-year-old Princess Marjorie, daughter of the newly crowned Scottish king, Robert the Bruce, is captured by England's King Edward Longshanks and held in a cage on public display.

Thirteen-year-old Koly enters into an ill-fated arranged marriage and must either suffer a destiny dictated by India's customs or find the courage to oppose tradition.

In 1886 in Alabama, an eleven-year-old African American girl and her family befriend and give refuge to a runaway Apache boy.

While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, twelve-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become Queen of Egypt some day.

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African-American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

In 1687 in Connecticut, Kit Tyler, feeling out of place in the Puritan household of her aunt, befriends an old woman considered a witch by the community and suddenly finds herself standing trial for witchcraft.

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

Prince Brat deserves his name--he causes trouble at every possible opportunity. Luckily for him it's forbidden to strike a prince, so the palace keeps a whipping boy. Jemmy, plucked from the sewers to become the royal whipping boy, dreams of returning to his life as a rat-catcher. One night the prince decides to run away and orders Jemmy to join him. The two boys embark on a comical series of misadventures that include two murderous highwaymen, a dancing bear, and a journey through the rat-infested sewers beneath the city.

Left alone to guard the family's wilderness home in eighteenth-century Maine, a boy is hard-pressed to survive until local Indians teach him their skills.

Thirteen-year-old Rosie and members of her family travel from their Illinois farm to Chicago in 1893 to visit Aunt Euterpe and attend the World's Columbian Exposition which, along with an encounter with Buffalo Bill and Lillian Russell, turns out to be a life-changing experience for everyone.

Told in the voices of eleven characters, about two young girls, one Jewish and the other African-American, who come to the attention of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan in a small Vermont town in 1924.

When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.

Sequel to: Sarah, plain and tall Sequel to: Sarah, plain and tall. When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.

In thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

Dear America Diary Series

In her diary, thirteen-year-old Hattie chronicles her family's arduous 1847 journey from Missouri to Oregon on the Oregon Trail.

A fictional journal in which eleven-year-old Minnie Swift tells how her family dealt with the difficult times during the Depression and how the arrival of an orphan from Texas changed their lives in Indianapolis just before Christmas 1932.

Twelve-year-old Amber Billows, upset to be moving once again to follow her father's reporting job, cannot help loving Hawaii, but the peace of her tropical paradise is shattered on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.

Thirteen-year-old C.J. records in a journal the conditions of the Dust Bowl that cause the Jackson family to leave their farm in Oklahoma and make the difficult journey to California, where they find a harsh life as migrant workers.

Thirteen-year-old Madeline's diaries for 1941 and 1942 reveal her experiences living on Long Island during World War II while her father is away in the Navy.

A fictional journal kept by twelve-year-old Augustus Pelletier, the youngest member of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery.

Twelve-year-old Zippy, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, keeps a diary account of the first eighteen months of her family's life on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1903-1904.

Eleven-year-old Nellie Lee Love records in her diary the events of 1919, when her family moves from Tennessee to Chicago, hoping to leave the racism and hatred of the South behind.

A diary account of fourteen-year-old Susanna Fairchild's life in 1849, when her father succumbs to gold fever on the way to establish his medical practice in Oregon after losing his wife and money on their steamship journey from New York. Includes a historical note.