Ellis, Deborah
Some of these titles (those highlighted) are not owned by Hamilton Middle/High School Library and will have to be obtained from another location.
Africa
|Akpan, Uwem. |Say you’re one of them. |2008 |358 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.7 |
A collection of short stories by Uwem Akpan that celebrate the resilience and wisdom of children in third world countries.
Africa – short stories
|Ellis, Deborah. |*Our stories, our songs: African children |2005 |104 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.7 |
| |talk about AIDS. | | | | |
Losing a leg to amputation after she steps on a landmine, Abonda must learn to walk again and make a new life for herself, and when she meets Hans and travels with him to Ireland for treatment, he helps her find a new purpose.
Amputees
Land mines
Africa
Ireland
|Maalouf, Amin. |Leo Africanus. |1992 |360 p. |Adult |
Leo Africanus writes to his son about the people he met, the places he visited, and the experiences he had as he traveled throughout the world from 1488 to 1527.
Leo, Africanus, ca. 1492-ca. 1550
Explorers Fiction.
Africa Exploration Fiction
|Stratton, Allan. |Chanda’s Secrets |2004 |193 p. |Grades 8-12 |3.7 |
Chandra struggles with the deaths of those around her and the shame of being molested as she continues her education and cares for her siblings and friend Esther, amidst the poverty and AIDs epidemic that plague her African homeland.
Children of AIDS patients -- Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa -- Social life and customs
|Stratton, Allan. |Chanda’s War |2008 |384 p. |Grades 8-12 |3.2 |
Chandra Kabelo, a teenaged African girl, must save her younger siblings after they are kidnapped and forced to serve as child soldiers in General Mandiki's rebel army.
Civil war, Africa
Africa, Orphans
Africa – Northern
|Aubin, Henry. |Rise of the golden cobra. |2007 |255 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.5 |
Dramatizes King Piankhy's invasion of Egypt in the eighth century B.C. through the eyes of Nebi, a fourteen-year-old Egyptian slave who narrowly escapes a brutal attack that kills his master and finds himself struggling over whether to take revenge.
Piankhi, King of Kush, fl. 720 B.C.
Egypt, History
|Gregory, Kristiana. |Cleopatra VII: daughter of the Nile. |1999 |221 p. |Grades 5 – 8 |6.2 |
A novel about the love and relationship between nine-year-old Suleiman and his mother in the midst of the political turmoil of Libya under the dictatorship of Qaddafi in the 1970s.
Refugees, Libya
|McGraw, Eloise. |Mara, daughter of the Nile. |1985 |279 p. |Grades 6-8 |7.5 |
These are the adventures of an ingenious Egyptian slave girl who undertakes a dangerous assignment as a spy in the royal palace of Thebes, in the days when Queen Hatshepsut ruled.
Egypt -- History -- To 332 B.C
|Rubalcaba, Jill. |The Wadjet Eye. |2000 |156 p. |Grades 5-8 |
Gordianus the Finder becomes caught in a tangle of political intrigue when he travels to Egypt seeking a cure for his ailing wife, Bethesda, and finds himself instead trying to prove the innocence of Meto, the son he disowned, who is suspected of trying to poison Caesar and Cleopatra.
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, d. 30 B.C.
Rome, History
Egypt, History -- Fiction
|Stolz, Joelle. |The Shadows of Ghadames. |2004 |119 p. |YA |5.9 |
Francis Bok describes his experiences after being kidnapped in 1986 at age seven from his village in southern Sudan and taken to live as a slave for wealthy Muslim farmers, and tells about his escape ten years later, his attempts to discover what happened to his family, and his eventual move to America.
Slavery – Sudan
|Dau, John Bul. |*God grew tired of us |2007 |287 p. |Grades 8-12 |9.9 |
Presents a first-person account of the terror, suffering, and tragedy of the Sudanese Civil War and how the author, John Bul Dau, eventually made his way out of the country to America.
Dau, John Bul
Sudanese refugees -- Biography
Sudan -- History
Dinka (African people) – Biography
|Dau, John Bul. |*Lost Boy, Lost Girl |2010 |159 p. |Grades 7-12 |6.2 |
John Bul Dau and his wife, Martha, describe the hardships they experienced, including violence, famine, and war, while growing up in the Sudan and explain how they escaped the region to start a new life.
Refugees
Sudan -- History
|Deng, Benson. |*They poured fire on us from the sky. |2005 |311 p. |Adult |
Presents the stories of three young men who as children in the late 1980s were forced from their homes by war in the Sudan and traveled, along with thousands of other boys, nearly one thousand miles in search of refuge, surviving hunger, illness, and human and animal predators.
Refugees – Sudan - Biography
Sudan – History
|Farish, Terry. |Good braider: a novel |2012 |221 p. |Grades 8-12 |
Follows Viola as she survives brutality in war-torn Sudan, makes a perilous journey, lives as a refugee in Egypt, and finally reaches Portland, Maine, where her quest for freedom and security is hampered by memories of past horrors and the traditions her mother and other Sudanese adults hold dear.
Refugees – Sudan
Sudan – History
|Greene, Melissa Fay. |*There is no me without you: one woman’s odyssey to |2006 |472 p. |Adult |
| |rescue Africa’s children | | | |
Tells the story of Haregewoin Teferra and her effort to care for the children of AIDS patients in her country of Ethiopia.
Teferra, Haregewoin
AIDS (Disease) -- Patients.
Orphans – Ethiopia -- Social conditions.
|Hamlin, Catherine. |*The hospital by the river: a story of |2001 |308 p. |Adult |
| |hope. | | | |
Gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamlin chronicle their efforts to establish a midwifery school in Ethiopia and the creation of their clinic, which treats women suffering from the catastrophic effects of obstructed labor.
Hospitals, Addis Ababa (Ethopia)
|Hari, Daoud. |*The Translator: a tribesman’s memoir of |2008 |204 p. |Adult |
| |Darfur. | | | |
Daoud Hari recounts his efforts to educate the world about the brutal genocide taking place in Darfur. He describes how he takes journalists into the heart of the country to reveal the horror his people face on a daily basis, and discussing how he has helped survivors find food, water, and safety.
Sudan -- History -- Personal narratives
Translators -- Biography
|Hawi, Abdi. |* Keeping Hope Alive: one woman, 90,000 |2013 |246 p. |Adult |
| |lives changed | | | |
An autobiography of Dr. Hawa Abdi who founded a camp for displaced people from Mogadishu, Somalia saving countless women and children whose lives have been shattered by violence and poverty.
Somalia -- Personal narratives
|Jansen, Hanna. |Over a thousand hills I walk with you. |2006 |342 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.2 |
Jeanne, the only member of her family not murdered in the Rwandan genocide, struggles to start a new life without her family while coping with the violent memories that haunt her.
Genocide -- Rwanda
|Kessler, Christina. |Our secret, Siri Aang. |2004 |218 p. |Grades 7-12 |
Fadumo Korn recalls her experiences after undergoing female genital mutilation at the age of seven, a common ritual in her Somali tribe, discusses the complications that led her to Mogadishu, Rome, and Germany where she had reconstructive surgery, and urges anti-FGM activists to be sensitive to traditional practices.
Female circumcision -- Case studies
Somalia Social life and customs
Korn, Fadumo, 1964-
|Kurtz, Jane. |Storyteller’s beads. |1998 |152 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.9 |
Marcus and his classmates at a school in California learn about the terrible problem of slavery in present-day Sudan and raise money to help buy the freedom of some of the slaves. Alternate chapters tell the stories of the slaves.
Slavery -- Sudan (Contemporary)
|MacColl, Michaela |Promise the Night: a novel |2011 |262 p. |Grades 6-9 |
Kenyan environmentalist, feminist, and political activist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, tells her life story.
Green Belt Movement -- Kenya
Women politicians Kenya -- Biography
|Mead, Alice. |Year of no rain. |2003 |129 p. |Grades 5-7 |4.9 |
In Uganda in 1972, fifteen-year-old Sabine and her family, wealthy citizens of Indian descent, try to preserve their normal life during the ninety days allowed by President Idi Amin for all foreign Indians to leave the country, while soldiers and others terrorize them and people disappear.
Uganda, History 1971-1979
East Indians, Uganda
Forced migration, Uganda
|Quirk, Katie |A Girl Called Problem |2013 |243 p. |Grades 5-9 |5 |
In 1967 Tanzania, when President Nyerere urges his people to work together as one extended family, the people of Litongo move to a new village which, to some, seems cursed, but where thirteen-year-old Shida, a healer, and her female cousins are allowed to attend school.
Tanzania, History 1964-
|Seal, Mark. |*Wildflower: an extraordinary life and |2009 |232 p. |Adult | |
| |untimely death in Africa. | | | | |
Wildflower is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction in which the shocking death of a dedicated environmentalist becomes a broader story of a beautiful, breathtaking country in peril.
Kenya
Wildlife Conservationist
|Smith, Roland. |Thunder cave. |1997 |250 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.2 |
Determined, after his mother's accidental death, to foil his stepfather's plans for his future, fourteen-year-old Jacob travels alone to Africa in search of his father, a biologist studying elephants in a remote area of Kenya.
Kenya
Masai (African people)
|Sullivan, Tara |Golden Boy |2013 |354 p. |Grades 8-12 |5.4 |
A Tanzanian albino boy finds himself the ultimate outsider, hunted because of the color of his skin.
Tanzania
|Talbott, Hudson. |Safari journal: the adventures in Africa |2003 |64 p. |Grades 3-6 |4.4 |
| |of Carey Monroe. | | | | |
Twelve-year-old Casey is unhappy about being sent on a trip to Kenya with his wacky Aunt Elaine, until he encounters fascinating customs, endangered animals, and wild adventures
Kenya
Poaching
|Whelan, Gloria. |Listening for lions. |2005 |208 p. |Grades 6-9 |6.5 |
An outcast in pre-World War II South Africa, young Peekay learns the power of self-reliance through the pain of the loneliness he experiences
Anglo-South Africans
South Africa -- History 1909-1961 --Apartheid
World War, 1939-1945 -- South Africa
|Craig, Colleen. |Afrika. |2008 |233 p. |Grades 7-12 |4.9 |
Thirteen-year-old Kim learns the truth about her father and her mother's homeland after visiting South Africa, where she meets relatives and other children her age and witnesses the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings.
South Africa -- Truth and Reconciliation Commission
South Africa -- History
Apartheid
|Farmer, Nancy. |Girl named disaster. |1996 |309 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.9 |
Alexandra Fuller chronicles the experiences she has while growing up on several farms in southern and central Africa from 1972 to 1990.
Zimbabwe -- History -- Chimurenga War, 1966-1980 -- Personal narratives, British
|Fuller, Alexandra. |*Scribbling the cat. |2004 |256 p. |Adult | |
The author provides an account of her journey through Rhodesia with her friend K, a white ex-soldier and born-again Christian, and their attempt to help him come to grips with the guilt he feels over his role in the Rhodesian War.
Zimbabwe – History.
|Glass, Linzi Alex. |Year the gypsies came. |2006 |260 p. |Grades 8- |6.0 |
Peter Godwin recounts the experiences he had after returning to his birthplace in Zimbabwe to be with his dying father, and shares his impressions of the country and the political and social changes that have thrown it into a vortex of brutality and hatred.
Godwin, Peter, 1957- Family
Zimbabwe -- History -- Biography
|Kann, Wendy. |*Casting with a fragile thread: a story of|2006 |284 p. |Adult |
| |two sisters and Africa. | | | |
White Connecticut housewife Wendy Kann recounts her privileged childhood in colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, discussing Africa's impact on her life and her family since, and describes her return to the continent after her youngest sister was killed in Zambia.
Zimbabwe -- biography
|Mankell, Henning.. |Secrets in the fire. |2003 |166 p. |Grades 4-8 |4.4 |
This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do -- he escaped to tell about it.
Blacks -- South Africa -- Biography
Apartheid -- South Africa
|McKissack, Pat. |Nzingha, warrior queen of Matamba. |2000 |136 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.9 |
A Zulu country parson arrives in Johannesburg and finds that his sister has become a prostitute and his son a murderer. -- Accused of murdering a white man, a young black South African turns to his minister father and a white attorney for help, but the racial problems of the country prevent justice from being served.
South Africans -- Apartheid
|Paton, Alan. |Too late the Phalarope. |1953 |253 p. |Adult | |
Sleuth Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of a Botswana detective agency, and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, investigate two very different cases--the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important government official and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest.
Women detectives -- Botswana
|Smith, Alexander McCall. |Tears of the giraffe. |2000 |240 p. |Adult |6.0 |
The story of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency continues as irrepressible sleuth Precious Ramotswe searches for a young man who vanished many years ago on the African plains, while dealing with her engagement to Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, sudden and unexpected motherhood, and her recently promoted new assistant
Women detectives – Botswana
|Tutu, Desmond. |*The rainbow people of God: making of a |1994 |281 p. |Adult | |
| |peaceful revolution. | | | | |
The story of Desmond Tutu's long struggle as spokesman for the antiapartheid movement. Includes his speeches, letters and sermons.
Church of the Province of Southern Africa -- Sermons
|Van de Ruit, John. |Spud. |2007 |331 p. |Grades 8-12 |6.8 |
In 1990, thirteen-year-old John "Spud" Milton, a prepubescent choirboy, keeps a diary of his first year at an elite, boys-only boarding school in South Africa, as he deals with bizarre housemates, wild crushes, embarrassingly dysfunctional parents, and much more.
South Africa
Humorous stories.
|Williams, Michael. |Now is the time for running |2009 |233 p. |Grades 7-12 | |
When soldiers attack a small village in Zimbabwe, Deo goes on the run with Innocent, his older, mentally disabled brother, carrying little but a leather soccer ball filled with money, and after facing prejudice, poverty, and tragedy, it is in soccer that Deo finds renewed hope
Zimbabwe
Homeless persons
Refugees
|Wooten, Jim. |*We are all the same: a story of a boy’s |2004 |243 p. |Adult | |
| |courage and a mother’s love. | | | | |
Presents the story of Nkosi Johnson, a South African boy born with AIDS who became an inspiration to thousands of people suffering from the disease because he believed tghat every child's life was important.
Johnson, Nkosi, 1989-2001 -- Health and hygiene
AIDS (Disease) South Africa Patients -- Biography
Africa - Western
|Abouet, Marguerite. |Aya. |2007 |96 p. |Adult |2.1 |
A graphic novel about the daily life of a nineteen-year-old girl named Aya living in Yopougon, Africa, during 1978; exploring her relationships with her father, who manages a beer company, and two best friends, who are determined to marry a wealthy man, and her own ambitions to attend college and become a scientist.
Africa – History, 1960
Africa – Ivory Coast
|Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. |Half a yellow sun. |2007 |543 p. |Adult |7.0 |
A novel set during Nigeria's struggle for independence in the 1960s involving five characters including thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a university professor, and the professor's mistress, and a young Englishman named Richard.
Nigeria
|Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. |Purple Hibiscus. |2003 |307 p. |Adult |5.8 |
Growing up in a wealthy Nigerian home with a tyrannical father, Kambili and her brother, find happiness during a visit to their Aunty Ifeoma, but as Kambili enjoys her freedom and falls in love, the country begins to fall under a military coup.
Nigeria -- Social life and customs
Southern – Congo
|Campbell, Greg. |*Blood diamonds : tracing the deadly path of the |2002 |251 p. |Adult | |
| |world's most precious stones. | | | | |
Explains how diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone has funded a brutal rebel war that has wrought havoc on the country's people; discusses connections to such groups as al-Quaeda; and measures the international diamond industry's complicity in the situation.
Diamond industry and trade - Social aspects - Sierra Leone.
Diamond miners - Crimes against - Sierra Leone.
Diamond industry and trade - Corrupt practices.
Sierra Leone - History - Civil War, 1991
|De Graaf, Anne |Son of a Gun |2012 |125 p. |Grades 7-9 | |
Eight-year-old Liberian Lucky, his ten-year-old sister Nopi, and their schoolmates are kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, but even after they escape along with some other children and are reunited with their parents, their lives will never be the same.
Liberia – History – Civil War, 1989-1996
|Erdman, Sarah. |*Nine hills to Nanbonkaha: two years in the heart of |2003 |322 p. |Adult | |
| |an African village. | | | | |
Explores how modern advancements and technology have impacted Nambonkaha, a small, primitive village in West Africa.
Nanbonkaha (Cote d'Ivoire) Social life and customs.
|Habila, Helon. |Measuring time. |2007 |383 p. |Adult | |
Twin boys, Mamo and LaMamo, raised in the tiny Nigerian village of Keti, eventually part ways when LaMamo escapes their tyrannical father by becoming a soldier; but when religious zealots threaten their village, LaMamo returns home to battle the enemy.
Soldiers - Nigeria
|Iweala, Uzodinma. |Beasts of no nation. |2005 |128 p. |11-Adult | |
Recruited by a unit of guerrilla fighters after the brutal murder of his father by militants, a West African student falls under the spell of his dangerous commander, and finds his new life increasingly contrasting with his former existence.
Child soldiers --Africa
War stories
|Kingsolver, Barbara. |Poisonwood Bible. |1998 |546 p. |11-Adult |7.9 |
The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives transformed over the course of three decades.
Christian Missionaries – Congo (Kinshasa)
|Land, Jon. |Blood diamonds. |2002 |383 p. |Adult | |
Detective Ben Kamal and sleuth Danielle Barnea join forces when they find themselves caught up in the violence and terrorism of the diamond-rich West African country of Sierra Leone.
Diamond mines and mining -- Sierra Leone
|Naido, Beverly. |The other side of truth. |2001 |252 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.5 |
Includes tales of dragons, demons, goddesses and spirits, with sumptuous illustrations and intriguing facts.
Silk Road -- Folklore.
Asia, Antiquities – Folklore
|Major, John S. |*The Silk Route: 7,000 miles of history |1999 |32 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.2 |
Memoir of three Chinese women, Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother in twentieth-century China.
China History.
Women China.
Chang, Jung, 1952 – biography.
|Compestine, Ying Chang. |Revolution is not a dinner party. |2007 |248 p. |Grades 5-9 |4.7 |
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.
China – History – Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976
|Conlogue, Ray. |Shen and the Treasure Fleet. |2007 |320 p. |Grades 5-9 | |
Teenager Shen and his younger sister, Chang, seek refuge with a troupe of traveling acrobats after they are separated from their parents, and eventually join the Treasure Fleet of the new Emperor in hopes that it would keep them out of harm's way.
Nanjing Shi (China) History
China -- History
Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644
|Dai, Sijie. |Balzac and the Chinese seamstress |2001 |197 p. |Adult |7.3 |
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.
Cultural Revolution – China
China History -- 1949-1976
|Fisher, Welthy Honsinger. |*To light a candle: the autobiography of an American |2007 |279 p. |Adult | |
| |missionary in China and India who founded Literacy | | | | |
| |Village. | | | | |
Welthy Honsinger began her life in 1879 in Rome, New York. After receiving her college education from Syracuse University, she traveled to China as a Methodist missionary to become principal of Bao Lin, a girls' school in Nanchang Province.
China -- Biography
|Fleming, Ann Marie. |*The magical life of Long Tack Sam. |2007 |170 p. |YA | |
Chronicles the life of the world renowned magician, acrobat, and vaudeville performer Long Tack Sam. Presented in graphic novel format with photographs.
Long Tack Sam, 1885-1961 -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Magicians, Biography -- Comic books, strips, etc.
Gratz, Alan. |Samurai shortstop. |2006 |280 p. |Grades 8-11 |4.9 | | |While obtaining a Western education at a prestigious Japanese boarding school in 1890, sixteen-year-old Toyo also receives traditional samurai training which has profound effects on both his baseball game and his relationship with his father.
Japan History Meiji period, 1868-1912
Hearn, Lafcadio. |In ghostly Japan. |1899 |241 p. |Adult | | | |In Ghostly Japan collects twelve stories from celebrated author Lafcadio Hearn. Some of these stories are ghostly and ghastly, while others are wonderfully benign. Whether he's telling a ghost story or explaining a Buddhist proverb, Hearn's writings are never less than enthralling.
Hearn, Liarn. |Across the nightingale floor. |2002 |305 p. |Adult / HS | | | |In ancient Japan, Takeo, a sixteen-year-old saved from a massacre by the mysterious Lord Otori, struggles to reconcile his dual nature--the one given him by the Hidden, the pacifist people among whom he was born and raised, and the one inherited from his father, a celebrated assassin
Japan.
Fantasy.
Hearn, Liarn. |Brilliance of the moon. |2004 |320 p. |Adult / HS | | | |A tale set in an alternate medieval Japan follows the adventures of Takeo and Kaede as they find their destinies shaped by factors outside of their control.
Japan.
Fantasy.
Hearn, Liarn. |Grass for his pillow. |2003 |288 p. |Adult / HS | | | |When he is abducted by his teacher, Takeo is forced to work as an assassin, and his beloved, Maruyama, returns to a broken family.
Japan.
Fantasy.
Hersey, John. |*Hiroshima. |1985 |196 p. |YA |7.5 | | |The story of six people who lived through the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 in Hiroshima.
Hiroshima-shi (Japan) -- History -- Bombardment, 1945.
World War, 1939-1945 Japan.
Hiroshima (Japan) -- History.
Atomic bomb victims -- Japan.
Holman, Sheri. |Sondok: princess of the moon and stars. |2002 |187 p. |Grades 5-8 | | | |In a series of messages placed in her grandmother's ancestral jar, a seventh century princess and future ruler of the Korean kingdom of Silla vents her frustration at not being permitted to study astronomy because she is a girl.
Sondok, Queen of Silla, d. 647.
Silla (Kingdom) .
Korea History To 935
Hoobler, Dorothy. |Demon in the teahouse. |2001 |181 p. |Grades 7-9 |5.8 |U | |In eighteenth-century Japan, fourteen-year-old Seikei, a merchant's son in training to be a samurai, helps his patron investigate a series of murders and arson in the capital city of Edo, each of which is associated in some way with a popular geisha.
Japan -- History -- Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Ooka, Tadasuke, 1677?-1751?
Hobbler, Dorothy. |Ghost in the Tokaida Inn. |1999 |214 p. |Grades 6-12 |6.5 |U | |While attempting to solve the mystery of a stolen jewel, Seikei, a merchant's son who longs to be a samurai, joins a group of kabuki actors in eighteenth-century Japan.
Japan -- History -- Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Hoobler, Dorothy. |In darkness, death. |2004 |208 p. |Grades 7-12 |5.8 |U | |In eighteenth-century Japan, young Seikei becomes involved with a ninja as he helps Judge Ooka, his foster father, investigate the murder of a samurai.
Ooka, Tadasuke, 1677?-1751?
Japan -- History -- Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Samurai
Hoobler, Dorothy. |Samurai never fears death: a samurai mystery. |2007 |198 p. |Grades 6-12 |5.5 |Z | |Returning home to investigate the possible connection of his family's tea shop with smugglers, Seikei, now a samauri in eighteenth-century Japan, becomes involved in murder at a local puppet theater and saving the life of his sister's accused boyfriend.
Japan History Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Samurai
Hoobler, Dorothy. |Seven Paths to Death. |2008 |192 p. |6-9 |4.9 | | |Samurai Seikei and Judge Ooka, his foster-father, search for seven men who have seven parts of a map tattooed on their backs, but when they put the pieces of the map together, Seikei and Judge Ooka learn of a dangerous location.
Japan History Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Samurai
Hoobler, Dorothy. |The sword that cut the burning grass. |2005 |211 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.4 | | |In his latest adventure in eighteenth-century Japan, fourteen-year-old samurai apprentice Seikei, with the help of a servant girl and an imperious old man, sets out to rescue the young Emperor Yasuhito from his kidnappers.
Japan History -- Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Samurai
Jacai, Feng. |Three-inch golden lotus. |1994 |239 p. |Adult | | | |The bound feet of Fragrant Lotus, a poor girl, attract the wealthy Tong Ren-an, and he chooses her as a daughter-in-law, but after his death and the revolutionary changes in China, Fragrant Lotus's asset becomes a liability.
Footbinding
Chinese fiction -- 20th century
Jiang, Ji Li. |*Red Scarf Girl: a memoir of the Cultural Revolution |1998 |285 p. |Grades 5-9 |6.1 |Z | |This autobiography details the author's experiences as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution.
China - Cultural Revolution
Jin, Ha. |In the Pond. |1998. |178 p. |Adult |7.4 | | |Shao Bin, a worker at the Harvest Fertilizer plant in a small Chinese factory town, sets off a storm of controversy when he composes a satirical cartoon criticizing his superiors for unfair practices and sends it to the provincial newspaper.
City and town life -- China.
Communes -- China
Jin, Ha. |War trash. |2004 |368 p. |Adult |7.5 | | |Captured by enemy forces, Yu Yuan, a Chinese army officer serving in Korea in 1951, takes on the role of interpreter due to his proficiency in English, a role that places him in a conflict between his fellow prisoners and their captors.
Korean War, 1950-1953
Chinese in Korea
Communists, Chinese
Kang, Hildi. |Chengli and the Silk Road caravan |2011 |178 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.4 | | |Called to follow the wind and search for information about his father who disappeared many years ago, thirteen-year-old Chengli, carrying a piece of jade with strange writing that had belonged to his father, joins a caravan charged with giving safe passage to the Emperor's daughter as it navigates the constant dangers of the Silk Road in 630 A.D.
Silk Road
China – History, 221 B.C.-960 A.D.
Kimmell, Eric. |Sword of the Samurai: Adventure stories from Japan |1999 |112 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.5 |S | |Seven short stories about samurai warriors, their way of life, courage, wit, and foolishness
Samurai
Japan
Kim, Richard. |*Lost Names. |1988 |198 p. |Adult | | | |Presents seven interrelated stories about the life of a boy living in Korea during the Japanese occupation, from 1932 to 1945
Korea -- History.
Lasky, Kathryn. |Kazunomiya: prisoner of heaven |2004 |156 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 |R | |Princess Kazunomiya, half-sister of the Emperor of Japan, relates in her diary and in poems the confusing events occurring in the Imperial Palace in 1858, including political and romantic intrigue.
Kazunomiya, Princess of Japan, 1846-1877
Japan History Tokugawa period, 1600-1868
Levathes, Louise. |*When China ruled the sea: the treasure fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-1433. |1994 |252 p. |Adult | | | |Tells of a fleet of Chinese treasure ships and seven epic voyages between 1405 and 1433.
Cheng, Ho, 1371-1435
China Commerce -- History
Li-Marcus, Moying. |*Snow falling in spring: coming of age in China during the cultural revolution. |2009 |176 p. |Grades 7-12 |7.1 |Z | |The author reveals the events of her life from age twelve to adulthood when the cultural revolution of Mao Zedong destroyed family customs and life as they knew it.
Li, Moying, 1954-
China -- History -- Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 -- Personal narratives.
Liang, Heng. |*Son of the revolution. |1983 |301 p. |Adult | | | |Contains the autobiography of Liang Heng, a young man growing up in China in the 1950s during the Great Cultural Revolution.
Liang, Heng, 1954-
Hung wei ping -- Biography.
China – History, 1949-1976.
Liu, Na. |*Little White Duck: A Childhood in China |2012 |108 p. |Grades 4-7 |5.6 | | |In graphic novel format, a young girl describes her experiences growing up in China, beginning with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976.
Liu, Na -- Childhood and youth.
China, -- History, 1976-2002.
Lu, Chi Fa. |*Double luck: memoirs of a Chinese orphan. |2001. |212 p. |Grades 5-10 |5.7 |W | |Tells the story of the author's struggles after being orphaned at the age of three and how he held on to his dream of coming to the United States as he passed from one relative to another and was even sold to a Communist couple.
Lu, Chi Fa -- Childhood and youth.
China, Social life and customs 1949-1976.
Ma, Jian. |*Red Dust: a path through China. |2001 |224 p. |Adult | | | |A travelogue in which Ma Jian shares the story of how his discontent with his job and marriage led him to embark on a three year journey through increasingly remote areas of China
Ma, Jian, 1953 -- Travel.
China -- Description and travel.
Ma, Yan. |*The Diary of Ma Yan. |2004 |166 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.1 |U | |Ma Yan's diary chronicles her struggle to escape the desperate poverty in rural China through education. But, with so little money to pay the fees, she must be persistent and resourceful.
Ma, Yan, 1987-
Mah, Adeline Yen. |*Chinese Cinderella: the true story of an unwanted daughter. |1999 |224 p. |Grades 5-10 |6.8 | | |Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair.
China -- Social life and customs
Chinese Americans -- California – Biography
Mah, Adeline Yen. |Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society |2005 |242 p. |Grades 5 and up |5.8 |V | |During the Japanese occupation of parts of China, twelve-year-old Ye Xian is thrown out of her father's and stepmother's home, joins a martial arts group, and tries to help her aunt and the Americans in their struggle against the Japanese invaders.
China, History 1937-1945
World War, 1939-1945 China
Mah, Adeline Yen. |*Falling Leaves. |1997 |278 p. |Adult |7.2 | | |Autobiography of physician and writer Adeline Yen Mah, discussing her emotionally abusive childhood, experiences of isolation and loneliness, success as a student, and triumphant struggle to achieve freedom and a new life
Mah, Adeline Yen, 1937-
Chinese Americans -- Biography
Women physicians -- Biography
McCaughrean, Geraldine. |Kite Rider. |2002 |272 p. |Grades 5-9 |6.2 |W | |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.
China -- History -- Yuan dynasty, 1260-1368
Min, Anchee. |Becoming Madame Mao. |2000 |340 p. |Adult | | | |A fictional portrait of Jiang Ching follows her life from her youth as the unwanted daughter of a concubine, to her search for fame as an actress in Shanghai. Including, along the way, her marriage to revolutionary Mao Zedong and her role in the turbulent Communist rule of China.
Chiang, Ch'ing, 1914-1991
Cultural Revolution – China
China -- History -- 20th century
Mori, Kyoko. |Shizuko’s daughter |1994 |214 p. |Grades 9-12 |6.5 | | |After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.
Japan – Fiction
Namioka, Lensey. |Ties that bind, ties that break. |2000 |154 p. |Grades 7-10 |6.3 |X | |Ailin's life takes a different turn when she defies the traditions of upper class Chinese society by refusing to have her feet bound.
Footbinding
China -- Social life and customs
Napoli, Donna Jo. |Bound. |2004 |192 p. |Grades 7-12 |4.8 |W | |In a novel based on Chinese Cinderella tales, fourteen-year-old stepchild Xing-Xing endures a life of neglect and servitude, as her stepmother cruelly mutilates her own child's feet so that she alone might marry well.
China -- History
Ming dynasty, 1368-1644
Footbinding
Park, Linda Sue. |Seesaw girl. |1999 |90 p. |Grades 4-7. |5.5 | | |Impatient with the constraints put on her as an aristocratic girl living in Korea during the seventeenth century, twelve-year-old Jade Blossom determines to see beyond her small world.
Korea
Park, Linda Sue. |A single shard. |2001 |152 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.8 |U | |Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself.
Korea
Park, Linda Sue. |When my name was Keoko. |2002 |199 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.1 |V | |With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
Korea -- History -- Japanese occupation, 1910-1945
Paterson, Katherine. |Sign of the chrysanthemum. |1973 |132 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 |U | |A teenager comes to know himself through contacts with social ills and political unrest while searching for his father in Japan's capital, centuries ago.
Japan -- History -- Heian period, 794-1185
Polly, Matthew |*American Shaolin: flying kicks, Buddhist monks and the legend of the iron crotch. |2007 |366 p. |YA/Adult |6.5 | | |Matthew Polly recounts the experiences he had during the two years he spent living and studying in China, performing with the Shaolin monks, who taught Matthew important lessons about life and his place in the universe.
Martial arts China
Shao lin si (Dengfeng Xian, China)
Red, Pine, translator |*Poems of the Masters: China’s classic anthology of T’Ang and Sung Dynasty verse. |2003 |480 p. |Adult | | | |Over one hundred poets are represented in this bilingual edition, including many of China's celebrated poets: Li Pai, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Wang Po, and Ou-yang Hsiu.
Poetry – Chinese – 960-1278.
Reid, T.R. |*Confucius lives next door. |2000 |276 p. |Adult | | | |The author draws upon his experiences living with his family in Japan to examine the cultural differences between the East and the West, exploring how Japan, China, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries have managed to maintain low crime rates, stable families, good educational systems, and civil harmony while Western countries are in chaos.
Japan – Social life and customs.
Salzman, Mark. |*Iron and Silk. |1990 |211 p. |YA | | | |An American describes his experiences after his arrival in Hunan Province in 1982 to teach English, including his wushu training and life in post-Mao China.
China – Descriptions
Shakya, Tsering. |*Dragon in the land of snows: a history of a history of modern Tibet since 1947. |1999 |574 p. |Adult | | | |A history of modern Tibet, discussing the efforts of Tibetan leaders to maintain the country's independence in the face of increasing political pressures.
Tibet (China) History 1900-1999
Shen, Congwen. |*Beautiful Xiangxi: a photographic journey of Hunan through the pen of Shen Congwen |2004 |299 p. |Adult | | | |The excepts that accompany the photographs in this book have been taken from a wide selection of Shen Congwen's writing.
Xiangxi Tujiazu Miaozu Zizhizhou (China) Pictorial works.
Shen, Fan. |*Gang of one: memoirs of a Red Guard. |2004 |279 p. |Adult | | | |Fan Shen, a twelve-year-old Red Guard in 1966, tells the story of how his enthusiastic support of China's Cultural Revolution turned to disillusionment and disgust, and led him to employ a series of devious tactics in his successful efforts to escape the country.
China History -- 1949-1976.
Tan, Amy. |Bonesetter’s daughter. |2001 |403 p. |Adult |7.1 | | |Over the course of one fog-shrouded year, mother and daughter find what they share in their bones through heredity, history, and inexpressible qualities of love
Chinese-American fiction -- 21st century
China -- Social life and customs
Waters, Mary Yukari. |The Laws of Evening. |2003. |177 p. |Grades 6-10 | | | |A collection of eleven stories portrays the difference between Japanese and Western culture
Japan – History – 20th Century.
Japan – History – Social life and customs.
Watkins, Yoko Kawashima. |My brother, my sister and I. |1994 |275 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.7 |V | |Living as refugees in Japan in 1947 while trying to locate their missing father, thirteen-year-old Yoko and her older brother and sister must endure a bad fire, injury, and false charges of arson, theft, and murder
World War II -- Refugees – Japan
Watkins, Yoko Kawashima. |So far from the bamboo grove. |1986 |192 p. |Grades 6- |6.3 |V | |A fictionalized autobiography in which eight-year-old Yoko escapes from Korea to Japan with her mother and sister at the end of World War II.
Japan
World War II -- Korea
Whelan, Gloria. |Chu Ju’s House. |2004 |240 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.2 |W | |In order to save her baby sister, fourteen-year-old Chu Ju leaves her rural home in modern China and earns food and shelter by working on a sampan, tending silk worms, and planting rice seedlings, while wondering if she will ever see her family again.
China -- History -- 1976-
Xinran. |Sky burial: an epic love story of Tibet. |2004 |206 p. |Adult |7.0 | | |Chronicles a Chinese woman's efforts to learn the truth about her husband's death in Tibet, tracing her journey across the country with a group of nomads who rescued her from near death.
Tibet (China) Description and travel
Yang, Gene Luen |Boxers. |2013 |328 p. |Grades 7-11 | | | |In 1898 during the Boxer Rebellion a boy named Little Bao recruits an army of Boxers to rid China of foreign missionaries and soldiers who bully and rob Chinese peasants.
China – History -- 1898
Yang, Gene Luen |Saints. |2013 |170 p. |Grades 7-11 | | | |In 1898 during the Boxer Rebellion a girl named Vibiana who is unwanted and unwelcome turns to Christianity, but she finds herself torn between her nation and her Christian friends who are being murdered by bands of young men.
China – History -- 1898
Yep, Laurence. |Hiroshima. |1995 |56 p. |Grades 4-7 |4.2 |S | |Describes the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, particularly as it affects Sachi, who becomes one of the Hiroshima Maidens
Hiroshima, Japan -- Atomic bombing, 1945
Yep, Laurence. |Lady of Ch’iao Kuo: warrior of the South |2001 |300 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 | | |In 531 A.D., a fifteen-year-old princess of the Hsien tribe in southern China keeps a diary which describes her role as liaison between her own people and the local Chinese colonists, in times of both peace and war.
China History Liang dynasty, 502-557
Yep, Laurence. |Mountain light. |1985 |281 p. |Grades 7- |4.8 | | |Swept up in one of the local rebellions against the Manchus in China, nineteen-year-old Squeaky loses his home and travels to America to seek his fortune among the gold fields of California.
China -- Immigration and emigration – History
China -- History -- 19th century
Manchus
Yep, Laurence. |Serpent’s children. |1984 |288 p. |Grades 7- | | | |In nineteenth-century China, a young girl struggles to protect her family from the threat of bandits, famine, and an ideological conflict between her father and brother.
China -- History -- 19th century
Yu, Hua. |To live: a novel. |2003 |250 p. |Adult | | | |After losing his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, Fugui is forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family to witness the horrors of the Civil War, only to return years later to face the hardships brought on by the Cultural Revolution.
Wealth
China History -- 1949-1976
Asia – Southeastern
Armour-Hielman, Victoria. |*Singing to the dead: a missioner’s life among refugees from Burma. |2004 |224 p. |Grades 5-8 | | | |The author describes her two years in the early 1990s as a Catholic lay missioner acting as liaison between the Mon Buddhist monks of Bangkok and the outside world, helping them hide Burmese refugees in their temple.
Catholic Church Missions – Thailand, Bangkok.
Armour-Hileman, Victoria, 1958-
Christian missionaries -- Biography
Aung San Suu Kyi |*Voice of hope. |1997 |201 p. |Adult | | | |A transcript of Alan Clements's interviews with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, focusing on her efforts to secure democracy for the people of Burma and discussing the challenges she faced while under house arrest from 1989 to 1995.
Burma -- Politics and government
Brown, Jackie. |Little cricket. |2004 |224 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.0 |U | |After the upheaval of the Vietnam War reaches them, twelve-year-old Kia and her Hmong family flee from the mountains of Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand and eventually to the alien world of Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Post-war aspects
St. Paul, Minnesota -- History -- 20th century
Hmong (Southeast Asian people)
Laos -- History -- 20th century
Crew, Linda. |Children of the river. |1989 |213 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.6 |X | |Having fled Cambodia four years earlier to escape the Khmer Rouge army, seventeen-year-old Sundara is torn between remaining faithful to her own people and enjoying life in her Oregon high school as a "regular" American.
Cambodian-Americans
Dang, Thuy Tram |*Last night I dreamed of peace: the diary of Dang Thuy Tram |2007 |225 p. |10-Adult | | | |An English translation of the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, a doctor who volunteered to serve in a Viet Cong battlefield hospital in the Quang Ngai Province during the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1970, when she was killed by American forces.
Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Medical care.
Physicians,Vietnam -- Diaries.
Fama, Elizabeth. |Overboard. |2002. |158 p. |Grades 7-10 |6.2 |Y | |Escaping from a sinking ferry in the waters off Sumatra, fourteen-year-old Emily fights for survival for herself and a young Indonesian boy, who draws courage from his quiet but firm Islamic faith.
Muslims
Sumatra (Indonesia)
Ho, Minfong. |Stone Goddess. |2003 |201 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.9 |W | |After the Communists take over Cambodia and her family is torn from their city life, twelve-year-old Nakri and her older sister attempt to maintain their hope as well as their classical dancing skills in the midst of their struggle to survive.
Cambodia -- History -- 1975-1979
Kadohata, Cynthia |A million shades of gray |2010 |216 p. |Grades 6-9 |4.3 | | |When Y'Tin's village in South Vietnam is attacked by North Vietnamese forces, he is faced with the choice to stay in the village as a prisoner or he can risk his life to save the elephants that he loves.
Vietnam History – 1975-
Lat. |Kampung boy. |2006 |141 p. |All ages. |4.5 | | |Relates the life experiences, from birth to his start in boarding school, of a Muslim boy growing up on a rubber plantation in rural
Malaysia -- History 20th century
Lewis, Richard. |Flame tree. |2004 |288 p. |Grades 8- |6.0 | | |Just before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, an anti-American Muslim group gains power in Java, and Isaac, the twelve-year-old son of American missionary doctors, finds his world turned upside-down.
Americans in Indonesia
Islam -- Relations – Christianity
Indonesia
McCormick, Patricia. |Never fall down: a novel |2012 |216 p. |Grades 9-12 |4.4 | | |When soldiers arrive in his hometown in Cambodia, Arn Chorn Pond is separated from his family and sent to a labor camp, where he works in the rice paddies until he volunteers to learn to play an instrument--a decision that both saves his life and lands him in battle.
Cambodia – History, 1975-1979.
Party of Democratic Kampuchea
Genocide
Myers, Walter Dean. |Patrol. |2001 |34 p. |Grades 4-8 |3.1 |M | |A frightened American soldier faces combat in the lush forests of Vietnam.
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Ratner, Vaddey |In the Shadow of the Banyan |2013 |320 p. |Adult | | | |Raami is seven-years-old when the Khmer Rouge regime takes power in Cambodia and over the next four years she fights for survival amid the systematic violence and atrocities that surround her.
Cambodia -- Politics and government -- 1975-1979
Samarasan, Preeta. |Evening is the Whole Day. |2008 |340 p. |Adult | | | |The firing of a servant girl in the household of the wealthy Rajasekharans, an Indian immigrant family in Malaysia, devastates six-year-old Aasha who knows a secret that, if revealed, could crack the carefully created facade of the outwardly proud, successful family.
East Indians.
Immigrants Malaysia.
Ung, Oung. |*First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. |2000 |238 p. |Adult |7.5 | | |This is the story of Loung Ung, a survivor of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime.
Cambodia -- Politics and government -- 1975-1979
Asia – Southern
Adiga, Aravind. |White Tiger. |2008 |276 p. |11-Adult | | | |Balram Halwai is educated in the art of corruption when he is hired as the driver for the wealthiest man in his village in India, by witnessing his employers bribe and barter through his rear view mirror.
Businesspeople Bangalore, India
Bangalore, India
Ali, Monica. |Brick lane. |2003 |369 p. |Adult | | | |Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she wonders if she has a say in her own destiny.
Bangladeshis in England
Muslims
Arranged marriage
Arni, Samhita |Sita’s Ramayana |2011 |152 p. |Grades 5-12 |4.6 | | |A graphic novel adaptation of the ancient Indian legend in which Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, forces his wife Sita to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove she is pure after she is abducted by Ravanna.
Vishnu (Hindu deity)
Folklore -- India
Badami, Anita Rau. |Tamarind Mem. |1996 |224 p. |Adult | | | |An ambitious sweep of storytelling spanning two generations of an East Indian family: the embittered, sharp-witted mother and her two daughters living in North America. Kamini now lives in Calgary, but she is haunted by her family's past, the sights and sounds of the Indian cities, the domestic routines and politics of family. Above all, the novel explores this young woman's attempts to understand the mysterious and acrimonious relationship between her parents.
Indo-Canadian
East Indians in Canada
Boo, Katherine |* Beyond the Beautiful Forevers |2012 |421 p. |Adult |7.8 | | |Examines and provides real-life accounts of urban poor families living in Bombay, India.
Bombay (India)
D’Adamo, Francesco. |Iqbal: a novel |2003 |128 p. |Grades 4-7 |5.1 |X | |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.
Masih, Iqbal, 1982-1995
Child labor exploitation -- Pakistan
Rug industry and trade -- Pakistan
Daswani, Kavita. |For matrimonial purposes |2003 |277 p. |Adult | | | |Unable to find a husband despite the efforts of friends, fortune-tellers, and matchmakers, thirty-three year old Anju, confronted by her family's shame, obtains their permission to leave Bombay to look for a husband in the United States.
India -- Social life and customs -- 21st century
Arranged marriage
Demi. |Buddha. |1996 |Unpaged |Grades 4 and up | | | |When Siddhartha, a prince, journeyed outside the palace gates and saw suffering, he began the journey that led him to become Buddha.
Buddha.
Ellis, Deborah. |Mud city. |2003 |164 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.5 |V | |This final book in the trilogy begun in "The Breadwinner" and "Parvana's Journey" paints a devastating portrait of life in refugee camps and shows the resourcefulness of children who endure great suffering there.
Refugee camps – Pakistan
Ellis, Deborah. |No ordinary day. |2011 |159 p. |Grades 4-7 |3.3 |W | |Valli has always been afraid of the lepers living on the other side of the train tracks in the coal town of Jharia, India, so when a chance encounter with a doctor reveals she also has leprosy, Valli rejects help and begins an uncertain life on the streets.
Leprosy
Jharia (India)
Finn, Mary. |Anila’s Journey |2008 |309 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.5 |Z | |In late eighteenth-century Calcutta, half-Indian half-Irish Anila Tandy finds herself alone with nothing but her artistic talent to rely on as she searches for her missing father, who is presumed dead
India -- History -- British occupation.
Forester, E.M. |Passage to India. | |293 p. |Adult |8.2 | | |Two women come to Chandrapore, India, and their lack of understanding of the culture causes one of them to make an unjust accusation.
India - Race relations
India - Social conditions
Ghosh, Amitave. |Glass palace. |2001 |256 p. |Adult | | | |Unable to forget the girl he befriended during the British invasion of 1885 when soldiers forced the royal family of Burma into exile, Rajkumar is lifted on the tides of political and social chaos to create an empire in the Burmese teak forests.
Myanmar -- History
Burma -- History
Malaya – History
Hesse, Hermann. |Siddhartha. |1951 |152 p. |Adult | | | |Siddhartha (literally "he who has achieved his aim") is a handsome young Indian Brahman who is restless and unhappy with his comfortable village life, and so he decides to become a seeker. Along with his friend Govinda, he becomes a samana, or wandering ascetic. He quickly masters the self-discipline and meditations, but he becomes dissatisfied with the ascetic life, and comes to the village of Savathi to hear the illustrious Buddha preach. Siddhartha is much impressed with Buddha's teachings but decides that he cannot be content as a disciple and must find his own "way."
Gautama Buddha
Spiritual life (Buddhism)
Jaffrey, Madhur. |*Climbing the mango trees: a memoir of a childhood in India. |2006 |297 p. |Adult | | | |The author provides a memoir of her childhood, family, and being a part of a large family in Delhi, India; along with a collection of tradition Indian recipes.
India – cooking
India -- biography
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. |Out of India: selected stories. |1986 |288 p. |Adult | | | |Contains fifteen short stories selected from four previous collections, all set in India.
India - Social life and customs
Lasky, Kathryn. |Jahanara: a princess of princesses. |2002 |186 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.8 |V | |Beginning in 1627, Princess Jahanara, first daughter of Shah Jahan of India's Mogul Dynasty, writes in her diary about political intrigues, weddings, battles, and other experiences of her life.
Jahanara, Begum, 1614-1680 Childhood and youth
Shah Jahan
India History 1526-1765
Mogul Empire
Malladi, Amulya. |Breath of fresh air. |2002 |240 p. |Adult | | | |A survivor of the catastrophic gas leak that devastated Bhopal, India, Anjali suffers through the loss of neighbors and family and the breakup of her marriage, but she finds new happiness in her remarriage to a loving professor and a successful career as a teacher.
Women -- India
Malladi, Amulya. |Mango season. |2003 |229 p. |Adult |5.7 | | |While visiting her family in India, Priya plans on announcing her engagement to an American man, but upon her arrival she learns that her parents have selected a husband for her and must choose between her own desires and her parents' wishes.
Brahmins -- India, South
Arranged marriage
India
Mann, Elizabeth. |*Taj Mahal |2008 |47 p. |Graes 5-8 |7.1 | | |This informative book offers a lively retelling of the construction of one of the world's most fascinating pieces of architecture.
Taj Mahal (Agra, India)
Markandaya, Kamala. |Nectar in a sieve. |2002 |190 p. |Adult | | | |A traditional peasant woman in early twentieth-century India struggles with poverty and the changes arriving in her agrarian village, particularly the tanning factory that takes her son's life.
Women -- India
Farmers -- India
McCormick, Patrica. |Sold. |2006 |263 p. |Grades 9- |4.8 |T | |A novel in vignettes, in which Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, is sold into prostitution in India.
Human trafficking
Calcutta (India)
Child prostitution
Nagpal, Saraswati. |Sita: daughter of the Earth |2011 |91 p. | |4.0 | | |Sita, the princess of Videha, is forced to leave behind the luxury of royal comforts and live the life of a forest dweller after being kidnapped by the wicked demon-king Ravana.
Folklore - India
Sita (Hindu deity)
Qamar, Amjed. |Beneath my mother’s feet |2008 |198 p. |Grades 7-10 |4.7 | | |When her father is injured, fourteen-year-old Nazia is pulled away from school, her friends, and her preparations for an arranged marriage, to help her mother clean houses in a wealthy part of Karachi, Pakistan, where she finally rebels against the destiny that is planned for her.
Family life -- Pakistan.
Perkins, Migali |Secret keeper |2009. |225 p. |Grades 7-10 |4.7 | | |In 1974 when her father leaves New Delhi, India, to seek a job in New York, Ashi, a tomboy at the advanced age of sixteen, feels thwarted in the home of her extended family in Calcutta where she, her mother, and sister must stay, and when her father dies before he can send for them, they must remain with their relatives and observe the old-fashioned traditions that Ashi hates.
Family life -- India.
Calcutta, 1974.
Roy, Arundhati. |God of small things. |1997 |321 p. |Adult | | | |1969 in Kerala, India, Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, struggle to forge a childhood for themselves amid the destruction of their family life, as they discover that the entire world can be transformed in a single moment.
Social classes – India
Family – India
Selvadurai, Shyam |Swimming in the monsoon sea. |2005 |274 p. |Grades 8-11 |5.8 | | |In 1980 Sri Lanka, fourteen-year-old Amrith's uneventful summer, filled with typing lessons and hopes of a part in his school's production of "Othello," is turned upside down when he falls in love with a boy.
Gay men
Sri Lanka
Shamsie, Kamila. |Kartography. |2002 |305 p. |Adult |6.0 | | |Raised from birth alongside her best friend Karim, Raheen enjoys a privileged Karachi childhood and mourns their separation when Karim's family moves, learning in the years that follow about their parents' complex friendship.
Pakistani fiction -- 20th century
Karachi, Pakistan
Shanghvi, Siddharth Dhanvant. |Last song of dusk. |2002 |304 p. |Adult | | | |Anuradha Patwardhan, a legendary beauty in 1920s India, marries handsome and well-to-do doctor Vardhmaan, but their married years are challenged by the death of their child and the arrival of a mysterious girl.
Gandhi, Indira, 1917-1984
Bombay, India -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Sheth, Kashmira. |Boys without names |2010 |316 p. |Grades 6-9 |4.2 | | |Eleven-year-old Gopal and his family leave their rural Indian village for life with his uncle in Mumbai, but when they arrive his father goes missing and Gopal ends up locked in a sweatshop from which there is no escape.
Bombay, India
Sweatshops
Sheth, Kashmira. |Keeping corner. |2007 |281 p. |Grades 7-12 |4.8 | | |In India in the 1940s, 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.
Child marriage
Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948
India, History -- British occupation, 1765-1947
Sheth, Kashmira. |Koyal dark, mango sweet |2006 |250 p. |8-11 |4.8 | | |Growing up with her family in Mumbai, India, sixteen-year-old Jeeta disagrees with much of her mother's traditional advice about how to live her life and tries to be more modern and independent.
India.
Smith, Roland. |Elephant run. |2007 |318 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.5 | | |Nick's father and others are taken prisoner when his plantation in Burma is invaded by the Japanese in 1941, leaving Nick and his friend Mya to risk their lives in order to free them from the POW camp.
World War, 1939-1945 – Burma
Prisoners of war
Burma – History – 20th Century
Staples, Suzanne Fisher. |Haveli. |1993 |320 p. |Grades 9-12 |6.5 | | |Having relented to the ways of her people in Pakistan and married the rich older man to whom she was pledged against her will, Shabanu is now the victim of his family's blood feud and the malice of his other wives. Sequel to Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind.
Arranged marriage – Pakistan
Staples, Suzanne Fisher. |Shabanu, daughter of the wind. |1989 |240 p. |Grades 9-12 |7.6 |Z | |In a year that brings a destructive sandstorm, a feud with a rich landowner, and other disasters, Shabanu, the eleven-year-old daughter of a nomad in the Cholistan Desert of Pakistan, becomes a victim of her people's views of sex role and marriage.
Cholistan Desert, Pakistan -- Fiction
Staples, Suzanne Fisher. |Shiva’s Fire. |2000 |288 p. |Grades 8-12 |6.8 | | |In India, a talented dancer sacrifices friends and family for her art.
India
Tezuka, Osamu. |Buddha. 1, Kapilavastu. |2003 |400 p. |Adult | | | |Presents a compilation of Japanese comics originally serialized in the 1970s, which retells the life of Siddhartha, beginning with his birth, and intertwines that story with those of several fictional characters, including the slave Chapra, his mother, the pariah Tatta, and Naradatta, a monk.
Buddha
Tezuka, Osamu. |Buddha. 2, The Four Encounters. |2003 |411 p. |Adult | | | |A graphic novel by Osamu Tezuka chronicles the upbringing and early manhood of the Buddha.
Buddha
Umrigar, Thrity N. |*First Darling of the Morning |2008 |294 p. |11-Adult | | | |A memoir in which Thrity Umrigar looks back on her childhood and adolescence in Bombay, discussing the paradoxes in her life, and the parallels between her coming-of-age, and the changes that occurred in her home country at the time.
Bombay, India -- Biography.
Parsees -- Biography.
Venkatraman, Padma. |Climbing the stairs. |2008 |247 p. |Grades 7-9 |4.8 | | |In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.
India – History, British occupation, 1765-1947
Venkatraman, Padma. |Island’s End |2011 |228 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.3 | | |A young girl trains to be the new spiritual leader of her remote Andaman Island tribe, while facing increasing threats from the modern world.
Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India)
Indigenous peoples
Whelan, Gloria. |Homeless bird |2000 |216 p. |Grades 6-9 |6.1 |X | |When thirteen-year-old Koly enters into an ill-fated arranged marriage, she must either suffer a destiny dictated by India's tradition or find the courage to oppose it.
Arranged marriage – India
Whelan, Gloria. |Small acts of amazing courage |2011 |217 p. |Grades 6-9 |7.3 | | |In 1919, independent-minded fifteen-year-old Rosalind lives in India with her English parents, and when they fear she has fallen in with some rebellious types who believe in Indian self-government, she is sent "home" to London, where she has never been before and where her older brother died, to stay with her two aunts.
India History, British occupation, 1765-1947
Great Britain History, George V, 1910-1936
Umrigar, Thrity. |The Space Between Us. |2005 |321 p. |Adult |7.0 | | |Captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
Women – Friendship
Bombay, India
Yunus, Muhammad. |*Banker to the poor: micro-lending and the battle against world poverty. |2003 |273 p. |Adult | | | |Muhammad Yunus discusses the obstacles he overcame in setting up a bank devoted to providing the poor of Bangladesh with small loans.
Bangladesh -- History
Asia – Southwestern
Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie. |A girl made of dust. |2008 |236 p. |Adult | | | |Her father withdrawn, her mother sad, and her brother, Naji, taken to hanging out with gun-toting teens, Ruba attempts to heal her family, beginning with her father, an endeavor that is complicated by the Israeli invasion of Ruba's homeland, Lebanon.
Lebanon, History
Israeli intervention, 1982-1984
Amirrezvani, Anita. |The blood of flowers |2007 |377 p. |11-Adult | | | |The death of her father leads a teenage girl in seventeenth-century Iran to go live with her mother as a servant in the home of her uncle, a wealthy rug designer in the court of the Shah, where she is able to develop her talent for rug design--a skill that becomes vital to her survival after her lack of a dowry forces her into a contract marriage, renewable every three months, with the son of a horse trader.
Women weavers
Iran, History
Ansary, Tamim. |*West of Kabul, East of New York |2002 |292 p. |Adult | | | |Ansary, son of an Afghan father and American mother, describes his life in Afghanistan where he was born in 1948, and in America where he has lived since the age of sixteen, and discusses the impact of an E-mail he sent to friends on Sept. 12, 2001 to express his feelings about the Taliban, which gained worldwide attention.
Civilization, Islamic
Afghanistan -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Anthony, Lawrence. |*Babylon’s Ark: the incredible wartime rescue of the Baghdad Zoo. |2007 |284 p. |Adult | | | |Chronicles the history of the Baghdad Zoo from the coalition's invasion of Iraq in 2003 through 2006, addressing how the attack had destroyed the grounds and killed many animals and discussing how the efforts of zoo personnel, American soldiers, and conservationist Anthony Lawrence helped reestablish the park.
Baghdad Zoo
Iraq War, 2003
Barakat, Ibtisam. |*Tasting the sky: a Palestinian childhood. |2007 |176 p. |7-10 |7.1 | | |A memoir in which the author describes her childhood as a Palestinian refugee, discussing her family's experiences during and after the Six-Day War, and the freedom she felt at learning to read and write.
Arab-Israeli conflict
Palestinian Arabs -- biography
Carmi, Daniella. |Samir and Yonatan. |2000 |183 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.2 |Z | |Samir, a Palestinian boy, is sent for surgery to an Israeli hospital where he has two otherworldly experiences, making friends with an Israeli boy, Yonatan, and traveling with him to Mars, where Samir finds peace about his brother's death in the war.
Palestine
Israel
Carter, Anne. |Shepherd’s Granddaughter. |2008 |224 p. |7-12 |4.1 | | |Amani's lifelong dream to be a shepherd like her beloved grandfather, Seedo, is devastated to discover the Israelis are going to build a settlement on the family homestead in Palestine, and while her uncle and brother prepare to take a militant stance, help comes from unexpected quarters.
Palestinian Arabs.
Israel -- Social conditions.
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Clinton, Cathryn. |Stone in my hand. |2002 |191 p. |Grades 6-12 |4.2 |W | |Eleven-year-old Malaak and her family are touched by the violence in Gaza between Jews and Palestinians when first her father disappears and then her older brother is drawn to the Islamic Jihad.
Muslims
Family -- Gaza Strip
Jewish-Arab relations
Dallal, Shaw J. |Scattered like seeds |1998 |335 p. |Adult | | | |Tells the story of Thafer Allam, the son of a celebrated Arab resistance fighter against the British occupation of Palestine before World War II, after he is uprooted by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Jewish-Arab relations
Dau, Stephen |Book of Jonas |2013 |238 p. |Adult |7 | | |Fifteen-year-old Jonas, the only survivor of his family after the U.S. bombs his Middle Eastern country, relocates to America where he tells a counselor about Christopher Henderson, an American soldier who disappeared after saving him.
Soldiers
Refugees
Delisle, Guy |*Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City |2012 |336 p. |Adult |6.7 | | |Guy Delisle uses the graphic novel format to portray daily life in Jerusalem, presenting a realistic picture of the many cultural aspects of this city that means so much to so many.
Jerusalem
Demi. |*Muhammad. |2003 |26 p. |Grades 4-7 |6.7 | | |Introduces Muhammad and the basic tenets of the Islamic faith.
Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632.
Prophets
Islam -- Customs and practices
Ellis, Deborah. |The breadwinner |2001 |170 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.5 |Z | |Because the Taliban rulers of Kabul, Afghanistan, impose strict limitations on women's freedom and behavior, eleven-year-old Parvana must disguise herself as a boy so that her family can survive after her father's arrest. Afghanistan (Contemporary)
Taliban
Ellis, Deborah. |Parvana’s journey. |2003 |199 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.5 |W | |Parvana buries her father, disguises herself as a boy, and sets out across war-torn Afghanistan to find the surviving members of her family.
Afghanistan (Contemporary)
Taliban
Ferraris, Zoe. |Finding Nouf. |2008 |305 p. |10-Adult | | | |The family of sixteen-year-old Nouf calls upon desert guide Nayir ash-Sharqi to investigate her disappearance; however, when her body is found in the desert and it is determined she died from drowning, Nayir teams up with lab worker Katya Hijazi to find out what really happened.
Saudi Arabia
Fletcher, Susan. |Alphabet of Dreams. |2006 |294 p. |Grades 7-12 |4.3 |T | |Exiled from their home country because of their father's plot against King Phraates, fourteen-year-old Mitra and five-year-old Babak, who are of royal descent, live as beggars until it is discovered that the boy can tell the future through his dreams, and the magus Melchoir and two other Zoroastrian priests take the children with them to Bethlehem to witness the coming of a new king.
Iran History To 640.
Zoroastrianism
Fletcher, Susan. |Shadow spinner. |1998 |219 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.5 | | |When Marjan, a thirteen-year-old crippled girl, joins the Sultan's harem in ancient Persia, she gathers for Shahrazad the stories which will save the queen's life.
Iran – History
Hakakian, Roya. |*Journey from the land of no: A girlhood caught in Revolutionary Iran. |2004 |256 p. |Grades 7-10 | | | |The author shares the story of her experiences coming of age in Iran during the revolution of 1979, discussing her situation as a member of the small Jewish population in the country at a time when Islamic fundamentalists gained control.
Iran – biographies / autobiographies
Iranian / American women
Hosseini, Khaled. |A thousand splendid suns. |2006 |372 p. |Adult | | | |A novel set against the three decades of Afghanistan's history shaped by Soviet occupation, civil war, and the Taliban, which tells the stories of two women, Mariam and Laila, who grow close despite their nineteen-year age difference and initial rivalry as they suffer at the hand of a common enemy: their abusive husband
Afghanistan
Hosseini, Khaled. |Kite Runner. |2003 |324 p. |Adult |6.8 | | |This story traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
The Seventies (20th century)
Kabol, Afghanistan
Khan, Rukhasana |Wanting Mor. |2009 |190 p. |Grades 5-8 |3.7 | | |Jameela must depend upon memories of her beloved mother Mor to sustain her when her stepmother abandons her in a busy market in Afghanistan and she ends up in an orphanage run by the same army that killed many of her family members.
Afghan War, 2001
Afghanistan
Latifa. |*My Forbidden face: growing up under the Taliban. |2001 |310 p. |Adult |9.0 | | |Latifa, a young woman who was sixteen in 1996 when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, tells about her family's experiences under the repressive regime. She focuses on the lives of women and girls who were abruptly denied the freedom to work, go to school, or even leave their homes without a male escort.
Women -- Afghanistan -- Social conditions
Afghanistan -- Politics and government
Afghanistan -- Social condition
Levine, Anna. |Running on eggs. |1999 |128 p. |Grades 5-9 |6.1 | | |When Karen and Yasmine become friends as well as members of a mixed Arab and Jewish track team in Israel, relatives and friends of both girls disapprove of the relationship.
Israeli-Arab relations
Khadra, Yasmina. |The swallows of Kabul. |2004 |208 p. |Adult | | | |Their lives as a diplomat and lawyer frozen by the ascendancy of the Taliban, Moshen and Zunaira find their situation becoming a nightmare when Zunaira is arrested and condemned to death.
Afghanistan -- Social conditions
Kabol, Afghanistan
Islamic fundamentalists
Repression – Afghanistan
Marston, Ella. |Figs and fate: Stories about growing up in the Arab world today. |2005 |135 p. |Grades 6-9. | | | |A collection of five stories portraying Arab life in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and Iraq today.
Middle East - Social life and customs
Arab countries - Social life and customs
Coming of age
Short stories
Mead, Alice. |Dawn and dusk. |2007 |151 p. |Grades 5- |4.2 | | |As thirteen-year-old Azad tries desperately to cling to the life he has known, the political situation in Iran during the war with Iraq finally forces his family to flee their home and seek safety elsewhere.
Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 -- Fiction.
Iran History 1979-1997 -- Fiction
Moran, Katy. |Bloodline Rising |2011 |382 p. |Grades 9-12 |5.4 | | |Cai, a thief in seventh-century Constantinople, finds himself held captive on a trading ship bound for Britain--the home his father, a ruthless barbarian assassin, fled long ago--where he discovers that his Anglish captors know more about the secrets of his family than he does.
Great Britain History, Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066
Constantinople, 7th Century
Mortenson, Greg. |*Stones into schools: promoting peace with books, not bombs. |2009 |420 p. |Adult |19.5 | | |Depicts the building of a school in an isolated area known as Bozai in Afghanistan where the author continued his efforts to promote peace through education.
Private Schools – Afghanistan
Private Schools -- Pakistan
Mortenson, Greg. |*Three cups of tea: one man's mission to fight terrorism and build nations--one school at a time. |2006 |338 p. |Adult |12.6 | | |Greg Mortenson recounts the experiences he had while trying to help impoverished villages in Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya build schools for their children.
Private Schools – Afghanistan
Private Schools -- Pakistan
Nafisi, Azar. |*Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books. |2003 |347 p. |Adult |8.4 | | |The author presents a memoir of her life in post-revolutionary Iran, focusing on her organization of a group of young women in 1997 who met secretly once a week to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature.
Teachers -- Iran -- Biography
Women -- Books and reading -- Iran
Nye, Naomi Shihab |*19 Varieties of gazelle: poems of the Middle East. |2002 |142 p. |Grades 6- |5.8 | | |A collection of sixty poems in which the Arab-American author examines life in the Middle East.
Middle East – Poetry.
Nye, Naomi Shahib. |Habibi. |1997 |271 p. |Grades 6-10 |6.3 |V | |When fourteen-year-old Liyanna, her younger brother, and her parents move from St. Louis to a new home between Jerusalem and the Palestinian village where her father was born, they face many changes and must deal with the tensions between Jews and Palestinians.
Jerusalem, Israel
Palestinian-Americans
Nye, Naomi Shihab |*Space between our footsteps: poems and paintings from the Middle East. |1998 |144 p. |Grades 8-12 |6.8 | | |Selected poetry translated into English from Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish
Middle Eastern poetry
North African poetry
Sasson, Jean. |*Princess: a true story of life behind the veil in Saudi Arabia. |1992 |304 p. |Adult |9.0 | | |The author offers a shocking glimpse into a world of opulent splendor and horrific oppression and presents the real-life story of a courageous modern Saudi princess who has risked her very life so that the truth may finally be told.
Saudi Arabia
Sasson, Jean. |*Princess Sultana’s Circle. |2000 |265 p. |Adult |7.2 | | |This book paints a horrifying reality for women of the desert kingdom. It is a look at the danger of Saudi male dominance and the desperate lives of the women they rule.
Saudi Arabia
Sasson, Jean. |*Princess Sultana’s daughters. |2001 |256 p. |Adult |8.5 | | |This book recounts one woman's daily battles to secure freedoms for herself and for the next generation.
Saudi Arabia
Satrapi, Marjane. |*Persepolis. |2003 |153 p. |Grades 10- |5.8 | | |Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen.
Muslims – Iran
Iran -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Iran -- History -- Islamic revolution, 1979-1997
Iran-Iraq War -- 1980-1988
Satrapi, Maryjane. |*Persepolis 2. |2004 |187 p. |Grades 10- |4.7 | | |Contains black-and-white comic strip images in which the author continues the story of her life, discussing her move from Iran to Vienna in 1984, her feelings of alienation in the foreign country, and her return home where she starts college, falls in love, and questions whether she can continue to live in the repressive society.
Muslims – Iran
Iran -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Sayres, Meghan Nuttell. |Anahita’s Woven Riddle. |2006 |352 p. |Grades 8-Adult |5.5 |Z | |In Iran, 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.
Iran -- History Qajar dynasty, 1794-1925
Seierstad, Asne. |*Bookseller of Kabul. |2003 |287 p. |Adult |6.4 | | |Asne Seierstand recounts the experiences she had while staying with a bookseller named Sultan Khan and his family in Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban, describing what it was like for families in Afghanistan to adjust to a new way of life and a new government.
Khan family
Kabol (Afghanistan)
Speare, Elizabeth George. |The Bronze Bow. |1961. |255 p. |5-9 |6.5 |U | |When the Romans brutally kill Daniel bar Jamin's father, the young Palestinian searches for a leader to drive them out, but comes to realize that love may be a more powerful weapon than hate.
Palestine – History To 70 A.D
Stein, Tammar. |Light years: a novel. |2005 |263 p. |Grades 8-12 |5.1 | | |Maya Laor leaves her home in Israel to study astronomy at the University of Virginia after the tragic death of her boyfriend in a suicide bombing.
Suicide bombings
Arab-Israeli conflict
Tbadi, Shirin. |*Iran awakening: one woman’s journey to reclaim her life and country. |2007 |236 p. |Adult |9.2 | | |A memoir of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi, that chronicles her childhood in Tehran, education, and professional career in law.
Women judges -- Iran -- Biography.
Nobel Prizes -- Biography
Temple, Frances. |Beduin’s Gazelle. |1996 |150 p. |Grades 6-9 |6.7 | | |In 1302, two cousins of the nomadic Beni Khalid tribe who are betrothed become separated by political intrigue between warring tribes.
Bedouins – Arab Countries – 14th Century.
Asia - Russia & Central Asia
Alexander, Robert |The Kitchen Boy. |2003. |229 p. |Adult |7.1 | | |A historical novel in which Leonka, an old man who served as a youth as kitchen boy in the Ipatiev House where the tsar and tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, were imprisoned, finally reveals what he saw, and what he did on the night the Imperial Family was executed in 1918.
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918 Assassination
Soviet Union History 1917-1921, Revolution
Benioff, David. |City of Thieves. |2008 |258 p. |10-Adult |5.9 | | |Seventeen-year-old Lev Beniov, having been arrested for looting the corpse of a German paratrooper, is given the opportunity to be released from jail if he, along with a soldier imprisoned for desertion, can secure twelve eggs to be used in the colonel's daughter's wedding cake by traversing the dangerous streets of Leningrad.
Russians -- United States.
Saint Petersburg (Russia) -- History.
Bondoux, Anne-Laure. |A Time of Miracles. |2010 |180 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.3 | | |In the early 1990s, a boy with a mysterious past and the woman who cares for him endure a five-year journey across the war-torn Caucasus and Europe, weathering hardships and welcoming unforgettable encounters with other refugees searching for a better life.
Caucasus – History
Refugees
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. |Brothers Karamazov |1880. |703 p. |Adult | | | |Three sons of an old drunkard search for faith in God.
Russia – 19th Century
Fleming, Candace |*Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the fall of Imperial Russia |2014 |292 p. |Grades 9-12 |7.4 | | |Details the history of Russia's last royal family, the Romanovs.
Russia – History – 1900-1917
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918
Gregory, Kristiana. |Catherine: the great journey. |2005 |169 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.8 |R | |A fictional diary of Princess Sophie, later named Catherine, from 1743 until 1745, when at age fifteen she is married to her second cousin Peter, Grand Duke of Russia, who will one day be Emperor.
Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 1729-1796
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 1709-1762
Peter III, Emperor of Russia, 1728-1762
Russia History Elizabeth, 1741-1762
Hess, Karen. |Letters from Rifka. |1992 |148 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.1 |S | |In letters to her cousin, a young Jewish girl chronicles her family's flight from Russia in 1919 and her own experiences when she must be left in Belgium for a while when the others emigrate to America.
Jews, Russian
Antwerp, Belgium
Holman, Felice. |The Wild Children. |1983 |148 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.3 | | |Left behind when his family is arrested by soldiers during the dark days following the Bolshevik Revolution, twelve-year-old Alex falls in with a gang of other desperate homeless children, but never loses his hope for a better life.
Soviet Union – History -- Revolution, 1917-1921
Iggulden, Conn. |Genghis: birth of an empire. |2007 |383 p. |Adult | | | |Tartar raids kill the father of Temujin and banishes his family from the land; but when he grows older, he assembles a small army of men and begins raiding Tartar camps and eventually unites all the Mongol tribes together.
Genghis Khan, 1162-1227
Mongols History
Lasky, Kathryn. |Broken song |2005 |154 p. |Grades 5-9 |4.3 |T | |In 1897, fifteen-year-old Reuven Bloom, a Russian Jew, must set aside his dreams of playing the violin in order to save himself and his baby sister after the rest of their family is murdered.
Jews, Russia History -- 19th century
Persecution Fiction
Russia – History, Nicholas II, 1894-1917
Lasky, Kathryn. |Night journey |1986 |150 p. |Grades |5.4 |T | |A young girl ignores her parents' wishes and persuades her great-grandmother to relate the story of her escape from czarist Russia.
Russia -- History -- Nicholas II, 1894-1917
Jews, Russian – Persecutions
Massie, Robert K. |*Alexandra and Nicholas |1967. |704 p. |Adult |9.0 | | |Massie offers a moving, tragic, and unforgettable account of the extraordinary Imperial dynasty of Tsar Nicholas II, his doomed empire, and a revolution that would inexorably change the world forever. "A larger than life drama.
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918.
Alexandra, consort of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1872-1918.
Russia--Politics and government--1894-1917.
Meyer, Carolyn. |Anastasia, the last Grand Dutchess. |2000. |220 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.4 | | |A novel in diary form in which the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II describes the privileged life her family led up until the time of World War I and the tragic events that befell them.
Anastasia, Grand Duchess, daughter of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1901-1918 - Fiction.
Russia – History, Nicholas II, 1894-191.
Miller, Sarah. |The Lost Crown |2011 |412 p. |Grades 8 & up |6.4 | | |In alternating chapters, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia tell how their privileged lives as the daughters of the tsar in early twentieth-century Russia are transformed by world war and revolution.
Revolution
Nicholas II, Emperor or Russia, 1868-1918.
Russia – History, Nicholas II, 1894-191.
O’Brien, Annemarie. |Lara’s Gift |2013 |193 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.7 | | |In 1914 Russia, Lara is being groomed by her father to be the next kennel steward for the Count's borzoi dogs unless her mother bears a son, but her visions, although suppressed by her father, seem to suggest she has special bond with the dogs.
Russia – History – 1904-1914
Pyron, Bobbie. |The Dogs of Winter |2012 |312 p. |Grades 5-9 |4.4 | | |Brought to Moscow in 1990s Russia by his mother's abusive boyfriend, five-year-old Mishka is forced by a gang of homeless children to lie and steal until he finds comfort and love with a pack of dogs.
Moscow (Russia) – 1990s
Sepetys, Ruta |Between Shades of Gray |2011 |344 p. |Grades 7-12 | | | |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.
Lithuania- 1940-1941
Siberia (Russia) – 20th Century
Snyder, Timothy |*Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin |2010 |524 p. |Adult | | | |Examines the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, describing how the killings were more widespread than many believed, and explores how those crimes influenced other events in modern history.
Russia – 19th Century
Tolstoy, Leo. |Anna Karenina |1877. |855 p. |Adult | | | |A novel of an adulterous love affair and the struggles for happiness and inner peace set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century.
Russia – 19th Century
Tschinag, Galsan. |The blue sky. |2006 |209 p. |Grade 7-Adult |6.1 | | |A young boy, one of the Tuvan sheepherding people of Mongolia, begins to doubt the traditional belief that the sky is a sheltering force when the communist regime begins to push a program of societal homogenization in the 1940s, while closer to home, his siblings go off to boarding school, he loses his beloved grandmother, and his dog is poisoned.
Mongolia
Whelan, Gloria. |Angel on the square. |2001 |305 p. |Grades 6-10 |6.1 |Y | |In 1913 Russia, twelve-year-old Katya eagerly anticipates leaving her St. Petersburg home, though not her older cousin Misha, to join her mother, a lady in waiting in the household of Tsar Nicholas II, but the ensuing years bring world war, revolution, and undreamed of changes to her life.
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918 -- Family
Russia -- History -- Nicholas II, 1894-1917
Whelan, Gloria. |Burying the sun. |2004 |224 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 | | |In Leningrad in 1941, when Russia and Germany are at war, fourteen-year-old Georgi vows to help his family and his city during the terrible siege
World War II -- St. Petersburg, Russia
St. Petersburg, Russia -- Siege, 1941-1944
Whelan, Gloria. |Impossible journey. |2003 |256 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.7 | | |In 1934, thirteen-year-old Marya and her younger brother, Georgi, set out alone on a long and arduous journey into Siberia to find their mother after she and their father are exiled for opposing Stalin.
Soviet Union -- History -- 1925-1953
St. Petersburg, Russia -- History -- 20th century
Wilson, Diane. |I rode a horse of milk white jade |1998 |288 p. |Grades 6-12 |6.3 | | |In 1339 Mongolia, Kublai Khan has forbidden women to own a horse or ride, but Oyuna has heard the prophesy of her grandmother, that one day she will ride a horse of her own to win honor for herself and her mother and father.
Mongolia -- History -- 14th century
Yelchin, Eugene. |Breaking Stalin’s Nose |2011 |140 |Grades 6-9 |4.2 | | |In the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, ten-year-old Sasha idolizes his father, a devoted Communist, but when police take his father away and leave Sasha homeless, he is forced to examine his own perceptions, values, and beliefs.
Soviet Union History
Communism
Europe and Americas
Europe and Americas - Western Europe
Aboulela, Leila |Minaret |2005 |276 p. |YA-Adult |5.0 | | |Najwa finds herself orphaned and in exile in London cleaning houses for wealthy Arab families; however, when she meets Tamer, the younger brother of her employer, they find a common bond and begin to fall in love
Sudanese
Political refugees
London, England
Muslim women
Love stories
Ali, Monica. |Brick lane. |2003 |369 p. |Adult | | | |Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she wonders if she has a say in her own destiny.
Bangladeshis in England
Muslims
Arranged marriage
Ayer, Eleanor. |*Parallel journeys. |2002 |244 p. |Grades 7- |6.5 |Y | |An account of World War II in Germany as told from the viewpoints of a former Nazi soldier and a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Angus, Sam. |Soldier Dog |2013 |249 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 | | |After his dad disappears, thirteen-year-old Stanley joins the army during World War I and is assigned to the War Dog School, where he is partnered with a messenger dog named Bones and the two of them are sent to France.
France.
World War I, 1914-1918.
Banks, Lynne Reid. |Dungeon. |2002 |288 p. |Grades 6-9 |6.1 | | |Driven by his grief over the loss of his family and by his longing for adventure, Bruce MacLennan sets out from Scotland for China, where he buys a young girl, who tries to ease his pain but instead is caught up in his desire for vengeance.
Scotland -- History -- 1057-1603
China – History – 1057-1603
Barnhouse, Rebecca |The book of the maidservant |2009 |232 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.3 | | |In 1413, a young maidservant accompanies her deeply religious mistress, Dame Margery Kempe, on a pilgrimage to Rome.
Pilgrimages
Middle Ages
Blankman, Anne |Prisoner of Night and Fog |2014 |401 p. |Grades 9-12 |6 | | |In 1930s Munich, the favorite niece of rising political leader Adolph Hitler is torn between duty and love after meeting a fearless and handsome young Jewish reporter.
Munich (Germany) – 1930s
Brooks, Geraldine. |Year of wonders: a novel of the plague. |2001 |308 p. |Adult |8.6 | | |Through the eyes of a housemaid, the story of the plague is told as it ravages a small village in England in the year 1666.
Great Britain History 1603-1714, Stuarts
Plague - England – History
Cadnum, Michael. |The Book of the Lion |2001 |204 p. |Grades 7-12 |8.5 | | |In twelfth-century England, after his master, a maker of coins for the king, is brutally punished for alleged cheating, seventeen-year-old Edmund finds himself traveling to the Holy Land as squire to a knight crusader on his way to join the forces of Richard Lionheart.
Knights and knighthood
Crusades Third, 1189-1192
Middle Ages
Cadnum, Michael. |The Leopard Sword. |2001 |204 p. |Grades 7-12 |7.5 | | |Hubert, a young knight's squire sailing back to England from the Crusades, must take up arms again when infidels attack the ship, and he discovers his fight is not over when he finally reaches home only to find a friend facing execution.
Knights and knighthood
Crusades Third, 1189-1192
Middle Ages
Casey, Maude. |Over the water. |1996 |246 p. |Grades 7-12 |5.7 | | |Fourteen-year-old Mary feels like a misfit, both in England where her family lives and in Ireland where they're from, until she and her family visit her grandmother and other relatives in Ireland and Mary gains a better understanding of her background, her mother, and herself.
Farm life -- Ireland
Chambers, Aidan |Postcards from no man’s land. |1947 |336 p. |Grades 9-12 |7.1 | | |Visiting his grandfather's grave during the annual commemoration of the Battle of Arnhem, Jacob Todd finds his view of himself, his country and his place in the world are overturned when he starts chatting to a very special elderly Dutch woman.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
World War II -- Campaigns -- Amsterdam, Netherlands
Arnhem, Battle of, 1944
Chevalier, Tracy. |Girl with a pearl earring. |1996 |233 p. |Adult |6.9 | | |A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town
Vermeer, Johannes, 1632-1675
Artists -- Netherlands -- History -- 17th century
Coats, Jillian Anderson. |The Wicked and the Just |2012 |344 p. |Grades 6 & up |4.7 | | |In medieval Wales, follows Cecily whose family is lured by cheap land and the duty of all Englishman to help keep down the "vicious" Welshmen, and Gwenhwyfar, a Welsh girl who must wait hand and foot on her new English mistress.
Wales History, 1063-1536
Middle Ages
Cornwell, Bernard. |Archer’s Tale. |2001 |374 p. |Adult |7.1 | | |After surviving a vicious attack on his village in 1343 A.D., archer Thomas of Hookton joins the army of King Edward III as he prepares to launch an invasion into France, but his search for vengeance takes him on an epic quest for the Holy Grail.
Hundred Years' War, 1339-1453
Thomas of Hookton
Great Britain -- History -- Edward III, 1327-1377
France -- History -- 14th century
Cornwell, Bernard. |Gallows Thief. |2002 |297 p. |Adult |6.4 | | |When Waterloo veteran Rider Sandman returns home to England from the war, he finds his country rife with corruption and injustice, and takes a job investigating the case of a painter sentenced to hang for a murder he did not commit.
London, England -- History -- 1800-1950
Cullen, Lynn. |I am Rembrandt’s daughter. |2007 |307 p. |Grades 7 and up |4.5 | | |In Amsterdam in the mid-1600s, Cornelia's life as the illegitimate child of renowned painter Rembrandt is marked by plague, poverty, and despair at ever earning her father's love, until she sees hope for a better future in the eyes of a wealthy suitor.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669
Netherlands, History -- 17th century
Dana, Barbara. |Young Joan. |1991 |340 p. |Grades 7-12 |3.9 | | |Joan, a girl growing up in the French countryside during the Hundred Years' War, begins to hear voices telling her she is destined to reunite her torn country in opposition to the English invaders.
Joan of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431 -- Childhood and youth
France -- History -- Charles VII, 1422-1461
Deedy, Carmen Agra |The Cheshire Cheese cat: a Dickens of a tale |2011 |228 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.5 |W | |A community of mice and a cheese-loving cat form an unlikely alliance at London's Cheshire Cheese, an inn where Charles Dickens finds inspiration and Queen Victoria makes an unexpected appearance.
Great Britain history, Victoria, 1837-1901
Dowd, Siobhan |Bog Child |2008 |321 p. |Grades 8-11 |3.6 | | |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.
Ireland -- History
Political Prisoners
Political violence
Doyle, Roddy. |Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha. |1993 |282 p. |Adult | | | |In the late 1960s, Paddy Clarke, 10, wants to be tough like his friends in their Dublin neighborhood.
Irish fiction -- 20th century
Dublin, Ireland
Frost, Helen. |The braid. |2006 |95 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.3 |S | |Two Scottish sisters, living on the western island of Barra in the 1850s, relate, in alternate voices and linked narrative poems, their experiences after their family is forcibly evicted and separated with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton, Canada, and the other staying behind with other family on the small island of Mingulay.
Cape Breton Island (N.S.) History 19th century
Scotland History 19th century
Canada History 1841-1867
Gleitzman, Morris |Once. |2010 |163 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.3 |S | |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.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland
Golding, Julia Golding, Julia. |Diamond of Drury Lane. |2008 |424 p. |Grades 6-8 |5.6 | | |Orphan Catherine "Cat" Royal, living at the Drury Lane Theater in 1790s London, tries to find the "diamond" supposedly hidden in the theater, which unmasks a treasonous political cartoonist, and involves her in the street gangs of Covent Garden and the world of nobility.
Drury Lane Theatre.
London (England) -- History 18th century.
Great Britain -- History 1789-1820.
Gregory, Kristiana. |Eleanor: crown jewel of Aquitaine. |2002 |181 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.9 |W | |The diary of Eleanor, first daughter of the duke of Aquitaine, from 1136 until 1137, when at age fifteen she becomes queen of France. Includes historical notes on her later life.
Eleanor, of Aquitaine, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of England, 1122?-1204
France History Louis VII, 1137-1180
Heneghan, James. |The grave. |2000 |245 p. |Grades 7-10 | | | |A thirteen-year-old foster child, drawn mysteriously to the site of a mass grave, suddenly finds himself in Ireland in 1845.
Ireland -- Great Famine
Liverpool, England
Heneghan, James. |Wish me luck. |1997 |195 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.1 | | |While on an ocean voyage to Canada to escape the air raids in his Liverpool home, twelve-year-old Jaimie Monaghan faces another kind of life-threatening situation.
World War II -- Great Britain
City of Benares (Ship)
Holeman, Linda |Search of the moon king’s daughter |2002 |309 p. |Grades 6-11 |6.1 | | |After her father dies, Emmaline and her family move to a mill town in Victorian England, but when her mother becomes addicted to pain killers and sells her son for money, Emmaline must travel to London to get her brother back.
London, England – 1830s
Hooper, Mary. |At the sign of the Sugared Plum. |2003 |169 p. |Grades 6-10 |6.2 | | |In June 1665, excited at the prospect of coming to London to work at her sister Sarah's candy shop, teenaged Hannah is unconcerned about rumors of Plague until, as the hot summer advances and increasing numbers of people succumb to the disease, she and Sarah find themselves trapped in the city with no means of escape.
Plague – London, England, 1665
Hooper, Mary. |Newes from the dead. |2010 |260 p. |Grades 9-12 |10.0 | | |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.
Great Britain – History, Stuarts, 1603-1714.
Green, Anne. b.1628
Hooper, Mary. |Petals in the Ashes. |2004 |200 p. |Grades 6-10 |6.3 | | |Hannah and Sarah escape London, leaving behind plague and death as well as their sweets shop, and when it is safe, Hannah and her younger sister Anne return, only to face the city's Great Fire of 1666.
Fire – London, England, 1666
Hooper, Mary. |Remarkable life and times of Eliza Rose. |2006 |333 p. |Grades 8-12 |6.5 | | |Hannah and Sarah escape London, leaving behind plague and death as well as their sweets shop, and when it is safe, Hannah and her younger sister Anne return, only to face the city's Great Fire of 1666.
Fire – London, England, 1666
Hopkinson, Deborah |*The Great Trouble: a mystery of London, the blue death, and a boy called Eel |2013 |249 p. |Grades 5-8 |3.8 |X | |Eel, an orphan, and his best friend Florrie must help Dr. John Snow prove that cholera is spread through water, and not poisonous air, when an epidemic sweeps across their London neighborhood in 1854.
Great Britain – History – Victoria, 1837-1901
Cholera – 1854 Outbreak
Ibbotson, Eva. |A countess below stairs. |1981 |383 p. |YA |7.1 |Z | |Anna, a young Russian countess forced to flee to England with her governess during the Russian Revolution, conceals her past in order to gain a much-needed job as a maid in the Westerholme household, where the growing attraction between her and Rupert, the handsome Earl of Westerholme, makes it difficult for her to keep her secret, and endangers his plans to marry for money.
Russia, History
Kimmell, Elizabeth. |In the stone circle. |1998 |225 p. |Grades 4-8 |5.5 | | |While spending the summer in an old stone house in Wales, fourteen-year-old Cristyn comes to terms with the death of her mother while satisfying the request of a thirteenth-century princess.
Haunted houses – Wales
Lasky, Kathryn. |Elizabeth I: red rose of the House of Tudor |1999 |237 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.8 |W | |In a series of diary entries, Princess Elizabeth, the eleven-year-old daughter of King Henry VIII, celebrates holidays and birthdays, relives her mother's execution, revels in her studies, and agonizes over her father's health.
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533-1603 Childhood and youth
Great Britain History Henry VIII, 1509-1547
Lawrence, Iain. |The convicts. |2005 |230 p. |Grades 5-9 |5.2 |T | |His efforts to avenge his father's unjust imprisonment force fourteen-year-old Tom Tin into the streets of nineteenth-century London, but after he is convicted of murder, Tom is eventually sent to Australia where he has a surprise reunion.
London (England) History 19th century
Lawrence, Iain. |The wreckers. |1998 |196 p. |Grades 5-9 |5.8 |X | |Shipwrecked after a vicious storm, fourteen-year-old John Spencer attempts to save his father and himself while also dealing with an evil secret about the Cornish coastal town where they are stranded.
Cornwall, England, 1799
Llywelyn, Morgan.. |Strongbow. |1992 |160 p. |Grades 9-12 | | | |Aoife (Red Eva) MacMurrough and Richard (Strongbow) de Clare, a Norman knight, fall in love and tell about their lives in the Middle Ages.
Normans in Ireland
Ireland -- History -- To 1172
Lobel, Anita. |*No pretty pictures: a child of war. |1998 |193 p. |Grades 6-12 |4.8 |Z | |The author, known as an illustrator of children's books, describes her experiences as a Polish Jew during World War II and their years in Sweden afterwards.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland
Marsh, Katherine. |Jepp, who defied the stars |2013 |385 p. |Grades 8-10 |8.6 | | |Jepp, a teenage dwarf living in 16th century Europe, leaves home to seek his destiny.
Europe -- History – 16th Century
Lyons, Mary. |Knockabeg: a famine tale. |2001 |150 p. |Grades 5-9 |5.0 | | |The faeries of Knockabeg become involved in the Irish potato famine as they wage war on each other.
Ireland -- History -- Famine, 1845-1852
McMahon, Patricia. |One Belfast boy. |1999 |54 p. |Grades 4-7 |5.0 | | |Describes the life of Liam Leatham, a young Catholic boy, and his family as he prepares for a boxing match that he sees as the first step out of violence-plagued Belfast
Belfast (Northern Ireland) Social conditions
Catholics Northern Ireland Belfast.
Meyer, Carolyn. |Beware Princess Elizabeth. |2001 |214 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.9 |Y | |After the death of her father, King Henry VIII, in 1547, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth must endure the political intrigues and dangers of the reigns of her half-brother Edward and her half-sister Mary before finally becoming Queen of England eleven years later.
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533-1603
Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558
Great Britain -- History -- Edward VI, 1547-1553
Great Britain -- History -- Mary I, 1553-1558
Meyer, Carolyn. |Doomed Queen Anne. |2002 |240 p. |Grades 6-9 |6.8 |Z | |In 1520, thirteen-year-old Anne Boleyn, jealous of her older sister's beauty and position at court, declares that she will one day be queen of England, and that her sister will kneel at her feet.
Boleyn, Anne, 1507-1536 -- Fiction
Great Britain -- History -- Henry VIII, 1509-1547
Meyer, Carolyn. |Patience, Princess Catherine. |2004 |198 p. |Grades 6-12 |7.4 |X | |In 1501 fifteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon arrives in England to marry Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII, but soon finds her expectations of a happy settled life radically changed when Arthur unexpectedly dies and her future becomes the subject of a bitter dispute between the kingdoms of England and Spain.
Great Britain -- History -- Henry VII, 1485-1509
Catharine, of Aragon, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, 1485-1536
Moran, Katy |Bloodline |2008 |297 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.0 | | |While traveling through early seventh-century Britain trying to stop an impending war, Essa, who bears the blood of native British tribes and of the invading Anglish, discovers that his mother is alive and he, himself, is a prince of the northern kingdom, but he has loyalties and loved ones in the south to whom he is compelled to return.
Great Britain -- History -- Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066
Moran, Katy. |Bloodline Rising |2011 |382 p. |Grades 9-12 |5.4 | | |Cai, a thief in seventh-century Constantinople, finds himself held captive on a trading ship bound for Britain--the home his father, a ruthless barbarian assassin, fled long ago--where he discovers that his Anglish captors know more about the secrets of his family than he does.
Great Britain History, Anglo-Saxon perion, 449-1066
Constantinople, 7th Century
Morpurgo, Michael. |An Elephant in the garden |2011 |199 p. |Grades 4-8 |5.7 |Y | |Lizzie and Karl's mother, Mutti, working at a local zoo in Dresden, Germany, during World War II while their father is away fighting in France, brings home Marlene, a baby elephant that is slated to be destroyed as the Allied bombing grows closer, and when they are forced to flee, Mutti feels they must take Marlene with them, adding even more danger to their journey.
World War, 1939-1945
Morpurgo, Michael. |Private Peaceful. |2003 |202 p. |Grades 7-12 |5.2 |X | |When Thomas Peaceful's older brother is forced to join the British Army, Thomas decides to sign up as well, although he is only fourteen years old, to prove himself to his country, his family, his childhood love, Molly, and himself.
World War, 1914-1918
Morpurgo, Michael. |War horse. |1982 |165 p. |Grades 6- |7.9 | | |Joey the horse recalls his experiences growing up on an English farm, his struggle for survival as a cavalry horse during World War I, and his reunion with his beloved master.
World War, 1914-1918
Naido, Beverly. |The other side of truth. |2001 |252 p. |Grades 6-10 |5.5 |Y | |Smuggled out of Nigeria after their mother's murder, Sade and her younger brother are abandoned in London when their uncle fails to meet them at the airport and they are fearful of their new surroundings and of what may have happened to their journalist father back in Nigeria.
Refugees -- London, England
Nigeria
Peet, Mal. |Life: an exploded diagram. |2011 |385 p. |Grades 9-12 |5.4 | | |In 1960s Norfolk, England, seventeen-year-old Clem Ackroyd lives with his mother and grandmother in a tiny cottage, but his life is transformed when he falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer in this tale that flashes back through the stories of three generations.
Norfolk (England) History – 20th Century
Great Britain History, Elizabeth II, 1952-
Peet, Mal. |Tamar. |2007 |424 p. |Grades 8- |5.4 |Z | |In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.
Netherlands – History, German occupation, 1940-1945
World War, 1939-1945 -- Underground movements, Netherlands
Reuter, Bjarne. |The boys from Saint Petri. |1994 |215 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.0 | | |In 1942, a group of young men begin a series of increasingly dangerous protests against the German invaders of their Danish homeland.
Denmark -- History -- German occupation, 1940-1945
Schmidt, Gary. |Anson’s way. |1999 |213 p. |Grades 5-9 |6.1 | | |While serving as a British Fencible to maintain the peace in Ireland, Anson finds that his sympathy for a hedge master places him in conflict with the law of King George II.
Ireland -- History -- 18th century
Boy soldiers – Ireland
Schroder, Monika. |My brother’s shadow |2011 |217 p. |Grades 7-12. |4.7 | | |In 1918 Berlin, Germany, sixteen-year-old Moritz struggles to do what is right on his newspaper job, in his relationship with his mother and sister who are outspoken socialists, and with his brother, who returns from the war physically and emotionally scarred.
Germany – History, 1918-1933.
World War, 1914-1918
Snyder, Timothy |*Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin |2010 |524 p. |Adult | | | |Examines the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, describing how the killings were more widespread than many believed, and explores how those crimes influenced other events in modern history.
Russia – 19th Century
Stolz, Mary |Bartholomew Fair. |1990 |152 p. |Grades 5-up | | | |On an August day in 1598 six people, including Queen Elizabeth, a wealthy cloth merchant, a scullery maid, two schoolboys, and an overworked apprentice, attend London's Bartholomew's Fair and come away with unforgettable experiences
Sutcliff, Rosemary. |Eagle of the ninth. |1954 |255 p. |Adult |7.2 |Z | |A young centurion ventures among the hostile tribes beyond the Roman Wall to recover the eagle standard of the Ninth, a legion which mysteriously disappeared under his father's command.
Great Britain History Roman period, 55 B.C.-449 A.D.
Temple, Frances. |Ramsay scallop. |1986 |310 p. |Grades 7-10 |6.7 | | |At the turn of the fourteenth century in England, fourteen-year-old Elenor finds her betrothal to an ambitious lord's son launching her on a memorable pilgrimage to far-off Spain
Pilgrims and pilgrimages, English
Medieval civilization – Europe
Ullman, James Ramsey. |Banner in the sky. |1954 |252 p. |Grades 7-9 |6.3 | | |A young boy feels compelled to conquer the mountain that caused his father's death.
Switzerland
Voorhoeve, Anne C. |My family for the war. |2012 |402 p. |Grades 7-12 |6.2 | | |Ten-year-old Franziska Mangold escapes Nazi Germany on the kindertransport she boards in Berlin, and when she arrives in London, she takes on the name Frances and struggles with her identity as she pieces together a new life without her family.
London, 1909. England
Waller, Sharon Biggs |Mad, Wicked Folly |2014 |384 p. |Grades 9 & up |5.3 | | |In 1909 London, as the world of debutante balls and high society obligations closes in around her, seventeen-year-old Victoria must figure out just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dream of becoming an artist.
World War, 1939-1945. England
Holocaust
Weil, Sylvie. |My guardian angel. |2004 |202 p. |Grades 6-8 |5.5 | | |Elvina, the unusual granddaughter of renowned Jewish rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, who prefers studying and writing to activities considered respectable for girls, takes a great risk by helping a young boy who has run away from a group of Christian Crusaders in eleventh century Troyes, France.
Jews France History 11th century
Crusades First, 1096-1099
Troyes (France) History 11th century
Wein, Elizabeth. |Code name Verity |2012 |343 p. |Grades 9-12 |8.6 | | |In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.
World War, 1939-1945
France – History, German Occupation, 1940-1945
Great Britain History, 1936-1945
Wein, Elizabeth. |Rose under fire |2013 |360 p. |Grades 9-12 |7.4 | | |When young American pilot Rose Justice is captured by Nazis and sent to Ravensbruck, the notorious women's concentration camp, she finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery, and friendship of her fellow prisoners.
World War, 1939-1945
Germany
Great Britain History, 1936-1945
Whelan, Gloria. |Small acts of amazing courage |2011 |217 p. |Grades 6-9 |7.3 | | |In 1919, independent-minded fifteen-year-old Rosalind lives in India with her English parents, and when they fear she has fallen in with some rebellious types who believe in Indian self-government, she is sent "home" to London, where she has never been before and where her older brother died, to stay with her two aunts.
India History, British occupation, 1765-1947
Great Britain History, George V, 1910-1936
Wiseman, Eva. |Puppet. |2009 |243 p. |8-11 |4.6 | | |A fictionalized account of the last-recorded "blood libel" trial in Europe, which describes the experiences of Morris Scharf, a Jewish boy who was forced to testify against his community--including his own father--in support of a stereotype that Jews murder Christian children for their blood.
Jews, Persecutions -- Europe.
Trials (Murder) -- Europe.
Wolf, Joan M. |Someone named Eva. |2007 |200 p. |Grades 6-9. |5.4 | | |From her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken with other blond, blue-eyed children to a school in Poland to be trained as "proper Germans" for adoption by German families, but all the while she remembers her true name and history.
World War, 1939-1945 Europe
Nazis
Europe History 1918-1945
Yolen, Jane and Robert Harris. |Queen’s own fool. |2000 |390 p. |Grades 7-12 |6.5 | | |When twelve-year-old Nicola leaves Troupe Brufort and serves as the fool for Mary, Queen of Scots, she experiences the political and religious upheavals in both France and Scotland.
Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots, 1542-1587
Scotland -- History -- Mary Stuart, 1542-1567
Europe and Americas - Eastern Europe
Arslan, Antonia. |Skylark Farm |2006 |275 p. |Adult | | | |Brother Sempad and Yerwant Arslanian are joyfully preparing for a reunion after forty years apart when World War I erupts, trapping Yerwant in Italy, and leaving Sempad's Armenian family at the mercy of the genocidal Young Turks.
Armenian massacres, 1915-1923 Turkey
Bagdasarian, Adam. |Forgotten Fire. |2000 |273 |Grades 8-Adult |7.1 | | |A boy survives Turkey's campaign of genocide against Armenians.
Armenian massacres, 1915-1923 - Turkey
Armenians - Turkey - History - 20th century
Filipovic, Zlata. |*Zlata’s diary: a child’s life in… |1994 |128 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.1 |X | |Originally published in Croat by UNICEF, this is the wartime diary of a Sarajevo girl who has since moved to Paris. Zlata began keeping her diary at the age of 11, nearly eight months before the shelling of Sarajevo began.
Sarajevo (Bosnia and Hercegovina -- History -- Siege, 1992 -- Personal narratives, Bosnian
Isaacs, Anne. |Torn Thread. |1996 |192 p. |Grades 6-12 |6.3 |W | |In an attempt to save his daughter's life, Eva's father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her sister survive the war.
Holocaust, Jewish (1933-1945)
Concentration camps -- Czech Republic
Jewish girls – Poland
Kelly, Eric Philbrook. |The Trumpeter of Krakow. |1929 |192 p. |Grades 5-9 |5.5 |Z | |A Polish family in the Middle Ages guards a great secret treasure and a boy's memory of an earlier trumpeter of Krakow makes it possible for him to save his father.
Poland -- History Casimir IV, 1447-1492
Middle Ages
Opdyke, Irene and Jennifer Armstrong. |*In my hands: memoirs of a Holocaust rescuer. |1999 |276 p. |Grades 5-Adult |5.9 | | |Just a girl of 17 when the Germans and Russians divided and devoured her native Poland, Irene Gut Opdyke put her own life in danger to save Jews. In this book, she puts away the laudatory titles of Holocaust Rescuer and Righteous Gentile to tell the story of girl who saw evil around her--and chose to defy it.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Polish
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) – Poland
Roy, Jennifer. |Yellow star. |2006 |227 p. |Grades 5- |6.1 |Y | |From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
Jews, Poland
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Poland History Occupation, 1939-1945
Seal, Jeremy. |*A fez of the heart: travels around Turkey in search of a hat. |1995 |237 p. |Adult | | | |Jeremey Seal tells of his travels in Turkey, the conditions in modern Turkey, and the history of the fez, the traditional headgear of Turkey.
Turkey – Description
Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk |Daughter of War |2008 |210 p. |9-up |5.5 | | |Marta, a young Armenian refugee, survives the Armenian genocide in Turkey during World War I, and disguises herself as a Muslim in order to locate her betrothed and her sister, who were sold into slavery.
Armenian massacres -- survivors
Turkey
Whelan, Gloria. |Parade of shadows |2007 |295 p. |Grades 7 and up |7.6 | | |In 1907, sixteen-year-old Julia Hamilton, happy to accompany her diplomat father on a tour of the Ottoman-controlled cities of Istanbul, Damascus, Palmyra, and Aleppo, soon finds the journey increasingly hazardous as she begins to uncover her father's true mission and the secret motivations of the other travelers in their group.
Turkey, History -- Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918
Middle East History, 20th century
Europe and Americas - Mediterranean Europe
Allende, Isabel. |House of the spirits. |1983 |368 p. |Adult |10.0 | | |The Trueba family embodies strong feelings from the beginning of the 20th century through the assassination of Allende in 1973.
Spanish fiction -- 20th century
Chilean fiction -- 20th century
Beaufrand, Mary Jane. |Primavera. |2008 |260 p. |Grades 7-10 |3.7 |X | |Growing up in Renaissance Italy, Flora sees her family's fortunes ebb, but encounters with the artist Botticelli and the guidance of her nurse teach her to look past the material world to the beauty already in her.
Italy – History, 16th century
Crowley, Suzanne Carlisle |The stolen one |2009 |406 p. |Grades 8- |5.5 | | |After the death of her foster mother, sixteen-year-old Kat goes to London to seek the answers to her parentage, and surprisingly finds herself invited into Queen Elizabeth's court.
Elizabeth I – 1533-1603
Great Britain, History
Cushman, Karen |Alchemy and Meggy Swann |2010 |167 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.3 | | |In 1573, the crippled, scorned, and destitute Meggy Swann goes to London, where she meets her father, an impoverished alchemist, and eventually discovers that although her legs are bent and weak, she has many other strengths.
Elizabeth I – 1533-1603
Great Britain, History - 1485-1603, Tudors
Grey, Christopher Peter. |Leonardo’s shadow. |2006 |390 p. |Grades 7-10 |6.1 |W | |Fifteen-year-old Giacomo, servant to Leonardo da Vinci, helps his procrastinating master finish painting, "The Last Supper," while also trying to find clues to his parentage and pursue his own career as an artist in late fifteenth-century Milan.
Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519
Milan (Italy) History
Italy, History 1492-1559
Heuston, Kimberley Burton. |Dante’s Daughter. |2003 |302 p. |Grades 10-12 |6.3 | | |In fourteenth-century Italy, Antonia, the daughter of Dante Alighieri, longs for a stable family and home while developing her artistic talent and seeking a place for herself in a world with limited options for women.
Alighieri family
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 Family
Italy, History 1268-1492
Hoffman, Alice. |Incantation |2006 |166 p. |Grades 7-12 |5.2 |Y | |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.
Inquisition -- Spain
Spain, 16th century
Lawrence, Caroline. |The assassins of Rome. |2003 |162 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.6 | | |Flavia and Nubia follow Jonathan to Rome and into the Golden House built by the emperor Nero, where a dangerous assassin lurks.
Titus, Emperor of Rome, 39?-81
Rome – History -- Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D
Lawrence, Caroline. |The gladiators from Capua. |2006 |198 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.0 | | |Suspecting their friend Jonathan is alive, Flavia, Nubia, and Lupus go to Rome for the Colosseum Games, facing wild beasts, criminals, conspirators, and gladiators, and where Nubia is called upon to make a terrible choice.
Gladiators
Colosseum (Rome, Italy)
Rome -- History Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.
Lawrence, Caroline. |The Pirates of Pompeii. |2004 |159 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.2 |T | |At a refugee camp following the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii, Flavia and her friends discover that children are disappearing and a very powerful citizen might be involved.
Rome -- History -- Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.
Vesuvius (Italy) Eruption, 79
Levitin, Sonia. |Escape from Egypt. |1994 |267 p. |Grades 8-10 |5.2 | | |When Moses comes to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land, Jesse, a Hebrew slave, finds his life changed by his growing faith in God and his attraction to the half-Egyptian, half-Syrian Jennat.
Exodus (Biblical event)
Jews -- History -- To 1200 B.C
Little, Melanie. |The Apprentice’s Masterpiece: a story of Medieval Spain |208 |310 p. |Grades 8-12 |4.0 | | |In fifteenth-century Spain, apprentice scribe Ramon witnesses his family become torn by the Inquisitions.
Inquisition
Spain
Meyer, Carolyn. |Duchessina, a novel of Catherine de Medici. |2007 |261 p. |Grades 7-12 |6.6 | | |While her tyrannical family is out of favor in Italy, young Catherine de Medici is raised in convents, then in 1533, when she is fourteen, her uncle, Pope Clement VII, arranges for her marriage to prince Henri of France, who is destined to become king.
Catherine de Medicis, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of France, 1519-1589
Clement VII, Pope, 1478-1534
Italy -- History
Miklowitz, Gloria D. |Secrets in the house of Delgado. |2001. |182 p. |Grades 7- |5.3 |T | |In Spain in 1492, fourteen-year-old Maria, a Catholic orphan, becomes a servant to a wealthy family of Conversos, converted Jews, at a time when the Jews are being expelled from the country and when the Inquisition is diligently searching for religious heretics.
Jews, Spain History -- Expulsion, 1492
Marranos
Spain, History -- Ferdinand and Isabella, 1479-1516
Napoli, Donna Jo. |Daughter of Venice |2002 |274 p. |Grades 6-10 |4.9 |X | |Frustrated with the restrictions her gender imposes on her life, fourteen-year-old Donata, disguised as a boy, sneaks out of her noble family's house to roam the streets of late sixteenth-century Venice and then must confront the repercussions of her actions.
Venice, Italy -- History -- 16th century
Napoli, Donna Jo. |For the love of Venice. |1998 |245 p. |Grades 7-9 |5.7 | | |Seventeen-year-old Percy is reluctant to accompany his family to Venice for the summer until he meets Graziella, a beautiful and passionate girl who draws him into a world where young Venetians make desperate, dangerous plans to save their city from being taken over by tourists.
Venice, Italy
Napoli, Donna Jo. |Smile |2008 |260 p. |Grades 6-10 |4.0 | | |A fictionalized biography that describes the life of Elisabetta, the woman who posed for Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, the Mona Lisa.
Renaissance Italy
Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519. Mona Lisa
Florence, Italy -- History 1421-1737
Roberts, Katherine. |I am the great horse. |2006 |401 p. |Grades 6-10 |7.1 |W | |The war horse Bucephalus recounts his adventures from 344-323 B.C. with Alexander the Great and his relationship with a groom who has prophetic dreams.
Alexander, the Great, 356-323 B.C.
Greece, History
Sobel, Dava. |Galileo’s daughter. |1999 |420 p. |Adult | | | |Chronicles the life of Galileo Galilei, focusing on his relationship with his eldest child Virginia, and explaining how she helped influence her father's work.
Galileo, 1564-1642 Correspondence.
Galilei, Maria Celeste, 1600-1634 Correspondence.
Astronomers Biography
Wojciechowska, Maia. |Shadow of a bull. |1964 |151 p. |Grade 4-7 |5.8 |U | |A young boy must decide whether to follow in his father's footsteps and become a bullfighter or follow his heart and become a doctor.
Bullfighters – Spain
Zenatti, Valerie. |Bottle in the Gaza Sea |2008 |149 p. |Grades 7-12 |5.8 | | |Seventeen-year-old Tal Levine of Jerusalem, despondent over the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, puts her hopes for peace in a bottle and asks her brother, a military nurse in the Gaza Strip, to toss it into the sea, leading ultimately to friendship and understanding between her and an "enemy."
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel Fiction.
Gaza Strip
Zenatti, Valerie. |*When I was a soldier: a memoir. |2005 |235 p. |Grades 6-12 |6.4 | | |Presents the memoirs of Valerie Zenatti, who at eighteen, enlisted in the Israeli army, endured harsh conditions and surroundings, and participated in top secret missions for the Israeli Secret Service, and describes her French-Jewish heritage and personal struggles.
Women soldiers - Biography.
Jews, Israel - Biography.
Israel Armed Forces - Biography.
Europe and Americas - Central America
Alvarez, Julia |Before we were free. |2002 |167 p. |Grades 7-10 |6.5 |X | |In the early 1960s in the Dominican Republic, twelve-year-old Anita learns that her family is involved in the underground movement to end the bloody rule of the dictator, General Trujillo.
Dominican Republic -- History -- 1930-1961
Alvarez, Julia |In the time of butterflies |2002 |167 p. |Grades 7-10 |7.1 | | |The story of three sisters murdered in the Dominican Republic in the 1960s because of their religious and political beliefs. Dede Mirabel tells about her three sisters, Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa, who became martyrs during the liberation of the Dominican Republic from Trujillo in 1960.
Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas, 1891-1961
Dominican-American fiction -- 20th century
Political corruption -- Dominican Republic
Women rebels -- Dominican Republic
Brown, Skila |Caminar |2014 |193 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.1 | | |In 1981 with the arrival of soldiers in his Guatemalan village, Carlos must flee and join a band of guerillas who head to the mountains where his grandmother lives to warn her about the soldiers
Guatemala -- History – Civil War, 1960-1996
Burg, Ann |Serafina’s Promise |2013 |299 p. |Grades 5-8 |4.3 | | |In a poor village outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Serafina works hard to help her family, but dreams of going to school and becoming a doctor--then the earthquake hits and Serafina must summon all her courage to find her father and still get medicine for her sick baby brother as she promised.
Guatemala -- History – Civil War, 1960-1996
Cameron, Ann. |Colibri. |2003 |227 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.1 |W | |Kidnapped when she was very young by an unscrupulous man who has forced her to lie and beg to get money, a twelve-year-old Mayan girl endures an abusive life, always wishing she could return to the parents she can hardly remember.
Mayan girls -- Guatemala
Guatemala -- Social life and customs -- 21st century
Danticat, Edwidge. |Breath, eyes, memory. |1994 |234 p. |Adult |4.6 | | |At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her
Haitian-Americans -- New York City
Haiti
Esquivel, Laura. |Like water for chocolate. |1992 |245 p. |Adult |7.2 | | |At the beginning of the 20th century, Tita, the youngest of three daughters, is expected to serve her mother for the rest of her life, but in order to show her love to Pedro, who is engaged to her sister, Tita cooks for him.
Spanish fiction -- 20th century
Mexico
George, Jean Craighead. |Shark beneath the reef. |1989 |182 p. |Grades 6-12 |6.9 | | |On the Island of Coronado, a young Mexican fisher comes of age as he becomes aware of the politics, corruption, and changes around him.
Islands -- Sea of Cortez
Mexico
Hobbs, Will. |Crossing the wire. |2006 |216 p. |Grades 5-12 |4.4 |T | |Fifteen-year-old Victor Flores journeys north in a desperate attempt to cross the Arizona border and find work in the United States to support his family in central Mexico.
Illegal aliens
Mexicans United States
Jaramillo, Ann. |La Linea |2006 |131 p. |Grades 5-8 |3.5 |T | |When fifteen-year-old Miguel's time finally comes to leave his poor Mexican village, cross the border illegally, and join his parents in California, his younger sister's determination to join him soon imperils them both.
Emigration and immigration
Mexico
Joseph, Lynn. |The color of my words. |2000 |144 p. |Grades 4-8 |5.5 | | |When life gets difficult for Ana Rosa, a twelve-year-old would-be writer living in a small village in the Dominican Republic, she can depend on her older brother to make her feel better--until the life-changing events on her thirteenth birthday.
Dominican Republic
Kidder, Tracy |*Mountains beyond mountains (adapted for young adults) |2013 |272 p. |Grades 7-12 |10.6 | | |Chronicles the life of Paul Farmer, focusing on his efforts to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring modern medicine to the countries and people who need them most.
Haiti
Landman, Tanya |The Goldsmith’s Daughter |2009 |283 p. |Grades 7-12 |6.1 | | |Itacate has a secret passion for goldwork--a craft forbidden to women in the golden city of Tenochtitlan--and is forced to disguise her identity to protect herself and her family, but when the city is shaken by Cortez's invasion, Itacate challenges fate, culture, and faith by crafting golden statues and pursuing a forbidden love.
Aztecs
Indians of Mexico
Mikaelsen, Ben. |Red Midnight. |2002 |212 p. |Grades 6-9 |5.4 |Y | |After soldiers kill his family, twelve-year-old Santiago and his four-year-old sister flee Guatemala in a kayak and try to reach the United States.
Guatemala
Mikaelsen, Ben. |Tree girl. |2004 |225 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.8 |W | |When, protected by the branches of one of the trees she loves to climb, Gabriela witnesses the destruction of her Mayan village and the murder of nearly all its inhabitants, she vows never to climb again until, after she and her traumatized sister find safety in a Mexican refugee camp, she realizes that only by climbing and facing their fears can she and her sister hope to have a future.
Guatemala
Mayas
Paulsen, Gary. |The Crossing. |1987 |114 p. |Grades 8-12 |7.1 |Y | |Fourteen-year-old Manny, a street kid fighting for survival in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border town, develops a strange friendship with an emotionally disturbed American soldier who decides to help him get across the border.
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
United States-Mexico border region
Resau, Laura. |What the moon saw. |2006 |257 p. |Grades 5-10 |6.6 |W | |Fourteen-year-old Clara Luna spends the summer with her grandparents in the tiny, remote village of Yucuyoo, Mexico, learning about her grandmother's life as a healer, her father's decision to leave home for the United States, and her own place in the world.
Country life, Mexico
Ryan, Pam Munoz. |Becoming Naomi Leon. |2004 |246 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.0 |V | |When Naomi's absent mother resurfaces to claim her, Naomi runs away to Mexico with her great-grandmother and younger brother in search of her father.
Mexican Americans
Mexico
Puerto Rican-American teenagers -- New Jersey
Talbert, Marc. |Heart of a jaguar. |1995 |215 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.9 | | |In this sometimes graphic account of Mayan village life, Balam, a Mayan boy struggling to achieve manhood, participates in fasts, prayers, and rituals to appease the gods and bring rain to his village.
Mayas -- Yucatan Peninsula -- Rites and ceremonies
Thirteenth century
Temple, Frances |Grab hands and run. |1993 |165 p. |Grades 6-12 |5.1 | | |After his father disappears, twelve-year-old Felipe, his mother, and his younger sisters set out on a difficult and dangerous journey, trying to make their way from their home in El Salvador to Canada.
Refugees, Salvadoran
Temple, Frances. |Taste of salt. |1992 |179 p. |Grades 8-12 |7.2 |W | |In the hospital after being firebombed and beaten by the Tonton Macoutes, seventeen-year-old Djo tells the story of his impoverished life to a young woman who, like him, has been working with the social reformer Father Aristide to fight the repression in Haiti.
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 1953-
Haiti
Urrea, Luis Alberto |Into the beautiful north |2009 |342 p. |Grades 10-up |7.2 |W | |In the hospital after being firebombed and beaten by the Tonton Macoutes, seventeen-year-old Djo tells the story of his impoverished life to a young woman who, like him, has been working with the social reformer Father Aristide to fight the repression in Haiti.
Mexico, Immigration
Europe and Americas - South America
Allende, Isabel. |House of the spirits. |1983 |368 p. |Adult |8.4 | | |The Trueba family embodies strong feelings from the beginning of the 20th century through the assassination of Allende in 1973.
Spanish fiction -- 20th century
Chilean fiction -- 20th century
Allende, Isabel. |Ines of my soul. |2006 |321 p. |Adult |6.8 | | |Presents a fictionalized history of the life of Ines Suarez, a Spanish conquistadora who helped found the nation of Chile. Describes how Suarez left her quiet life as a seamstress in Spain to embark on a daring quest to find her missing husband. After finding out he had died in battle, Suarez began a new life in Peru where she met Pedro de Valdivia, a war hero, and together they fought for the nation of Chile.
Chile – History – 1565-1810.
Suarez, Ines, 1507 (ca.)-1580.
Bridal, Tessa. |Tree of red stars. |1997 |287 p. |Adult | | | |In the 1970s, wealthy Magdalena Ortega Grey lives in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she becomes a university student who joins the urban-guerrilla Tupamaro movement and suffers for her choice.
Uruguay – History – 1904-1973
Diaz, Junot. |The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. |2007 |339 p. |11-Adult |6.8 | | |Overweight and nerdy Oscar lives with his Dominican American mother and sister in New Jersey and dreams of becoming a renowned author and finding true love, but unfortunately, a family curse stands in the way of his wishes.
Dominican Americans.
Durango, Julia. |Walls of Cartagena |2008 |152 p. |Grades 5-8 |5.6 | | |Thirteen-year-old Calepino, an African slave in the seventeenth-century Caribbean city of Cartagena, works as a translator for a Jesuit priest who tends to newly-arrived slaves and, after working for a Jewish doctor in a leper colony and helping an Angolan boy and his mother escape, he realizes his true calling.
Leprosy
Catholic Church
Cartagena, Colombia -- History 17th century
Engle, Margarita. |*Surrender tree: poems of Cuba’s struggle for freedom. |2008 |169 p. |Grades 6-12 |5.2 |Z | |A collection of poems in which Rosa, a healer, describes her experiences trying to help Cuban peasants who have been forced to leave their farms and villages in 1896 and given eight days to find their way to "reconcentration camps" or be killed.
Cuba History 1810-1899 Poetry
Engle, Margarita. |Tropical Secrets: Holocaust refugees in Cuba |2009 |199 p. |Grades 5-9 |9.6 | | |Escaping from Nazi Germany to Cuba in 1939, a young Jewish refugee dreams of finding his parents again, befriends a local girl with painful secrets of her own, and discovers that the Nazi darkness is never far away.
Cuba History 1933-1959
Holocaust 1939-1945
Grann, David |* The lost city of Z: a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon |2009 |339 p. |Adult | | | |Details English explorer Percy Fawcett's exploration for a lost city in the jungles of South America and relates efforts made by the author and other individuals to find out what happened to him.
Amazon River
Fawcett, Percy Harrison, 1867-1925?
Le Brinton, Brinka. |*The Greatest Gift: the courageous life and death of Sister Dorothy Stang. |2007 |240 p. |Adult | | | |Chronicles the life of Sister Dorothy Stang, who devoted her life to helping poor farmers in the Amazon protect their land from loggers and land developers and was killed in 2005 by powerful companies who wanted her work stopped.
Stang, Dorothy (Dorothy Mae), d. 2005 – Biography
Catholic Church – Missions – Brazil.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. |One Hundred Years of Solitude |1970 |422 p. |Adult |8.7 | | |The rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.
Latin America -- Social conditions
Peet, Mal. |Keeper |2003 |225 p. |Grades 8-12 |7.1 |Y | |South American journalist Paul Faustino begins his interview with World Cup Soccer star El Gato and learns a fantastic story of a young, lonely boy growing up in the middle of a rain forest who wandered upon a mysterious soccer field and an apparition that appeared to him daily.
Soccer
Brazil
Peet, Mal. |Penalty |2007 |262 p. |Grades 8-12 |5.4 |Z | |Sports reporter Paul Faustino reluctantly investigates the disappearance of a young soccer star from San Juan who has not been seen since he missed a winning penalty kick during a big game, and unknowingly the journalist becomes entangled in a world of slavery and the occult.
South America
Soccer
Schmidt, C.A. |Useful Fools |2007 |262 p. |Grades 9-12 |4.2 | | |A fifteen-year-old Peruvian boy, whose mother runs a clinic for poor village children, becomes caught up in the war after Senderistas bomb the clinic, killing his mother and throwing his family into turmoil.
Shining Path (Guerrilla group)
Peru -- History
Whelan, Gloria. |Disappeared. |2008 |136 p. |Grades 7-10 |5.3 | | |Teenaged Silvia tries to save her brother, Eduardo, after he is captured by the military government in 1970s Argentina.
Argentina -- History Dirty War, 1976-1983
Other…
Dunn, Ross E. |*The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: a Muslin traveler in the 14th Century. |2005 |359 p. |Adult | | | |Contains an interpretation of the life and times of fourteenth-century traveler Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta.
Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377.
Travelers, Islamic Empire Biography.
Edwardson, Debby Dahl |Blessing’s Bead |2009 |178 p. |Grades 8-up |5.6 | | |In 1917, Aaluk leaves for Siberia while her sister Nutaaq remains in their Alaskan village and becomes one of the few survivors of an influenza epidemic, then in 1986, Nunaaq's great-granddaughter leaves her mother due to a different kind of sickness and returns to the village where they were born.
Alaska, History
Kidder, Tracy. |*Mountains beyond Mountains. |2003 |322 p. |Adult |8.0 | | |Chronicles the life of Paul Farmer, focusing on his efforts to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring modern medicine to the countries and people who need them most.
Missionaries -- Biography
Medical missions
Lawrence, Iain. |The cannibals. |2005 |230 p. |Grades 5-9 |5.2 |T | |Tom Tin and his friend Midgely--with assorted juvenile criminals--escape the ship taking them to serve their terms in Australia and head for a Pacific island, forgetting Tom's father's warnings about headhunters and cannibals.
Islands of the Pacific History 19th century
McNeill, J.R. and William. |*The Human web: a Bird’s-eye view of world history. |2000 |340 p. |Adult | | | |Examines the interactive cooperative and competitive "human webs" that have thrived throughout world history, through which the exchange of products, power, and ideas has shaped societies and global relations from the days of the first civilizations to the twenty-first century.
Human history
Newth, Mette. |Transformation. |2000 |195 p. |Grades 8-12 |7.1 | | |On a journey to appease the Sea's Mother, Navarana saves the life of one of the Strangers who had come to Greenland to rescue the few Christians living there and together they find a way to end the suffering of Navarana's people.
Inuit -- Greenland
Pomeranz, Ken. |*World that trade created: society, culture, |1999 |256 p. |Adult | | | |Presents over seventy vignettes that provide historical perspectives on aspects of the world economy, discussing the world economy before European domination, the origins of international standards and practices, the nature and consequences of industrialization and deindustrialization, and other topics.
Commerce -- History
Culture -- History
Industrialization -- Social aspects -- History
International economic relations History
Economic condition
Rumford, James. |*Traveling man: the journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354. |2001 |38 p. |All ages |3.9 | | |A pictorial account of the traveler and pilgrim Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century, following him from Morocco to Jerusalem to Mecca and to the edges of the known world.
Asia -- Description and travel
Africa -- Description and travel
Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377
US Immigrant Experience
Allende, Isabel. |Daughter of fortune. |2003 |307 p. |Adult |9.0 | | |The story of a young woman's quest for love and fortune during the California Gold Rush in San Francisco. Spanish fiction -- 20th century -- Translations into English
Chilean fiction -- 20th century
Latinas -- California
Chinese-Americans -- California
Ansary, Tamim. |*West of Kabul, East of New York |2002 |292 p. |Adult | | | |Ansary, son of an Afghan father and American mother, describes his life in Afghanistan where he was born in 1948, and in America where he has lived since the age of sixteen, and discusses the impact of an E-mail he sent to friends on Sept. 12, 2001 to express his feelings about the Taliban, which gained worldwide attention.
Civilization, Islamic
Afghanistan -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Delman, Carmit. |*Burnt bread and chutney: growing up between cultures. |2003 |304 p. |Adult | | | |Carmit Delman’s journey through religious traditions, family tensions, and social tribulations to a healthy sense of wholeness and self is rendered with grace and an acute sense of depth. Burnt Bread and Chutney is a rich and innovative book that opens wide a previously unseen world.
Jews - United States - Biography.
East Indians - Biography.
Indian Jews
Hindu
Muslim
Halaby, Laila. |West of the Jordan. |2003 |220 p. |Adult |5.6 | | |Four cousins on the brink of maturity struggle with national, ethnic, and sexual identities.
Jordanian-Americans
Arab-American families
Jordan
West Bank (Jordan River
Lekuton, Joseph. |*Facing the lion: growing up Maasai on the African Savanna. |2003 |127 p. |Grades 5-12 |5.2 |R | |A member of the Masai people describes his life as he grew up in a northern Kenya village, traveled to America to attend college, and became an elementary school teacher in Virginia.
Masai (African people) -- Biography
Masai (African people) -- Kenya -- Social life and customs
Na, An. |A step from heaven. |2000 |156 p. |Grades 9-12 |7.1 | | |A young Korean girl and her family find it difficult to learn English and adjust to life in America.
Korean-American families (Contemporary)
Tan, Amy. |Joy luck club. |1989 |352 p. |Adult |8.4 |Z | |Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughters' memories and feelings.
Chinese-American fiction -- 20th century
Chinese immigrants -- San Francisco, California
Ung, Luong. |*Lucky child: a daughter of Cambodia in America… |2005 |268 |Adult | | | |Loung Ung recounts her struggles to adapt to life in America after arriving in 1980 as a ten-year-old Cambodian refugee.
Cambodian Americans - Biography
Refugees - United States - Biography
Atrocities - Cambodia - History
Yep, Laurence. |Ribbons. |1996 |179 p. |Grades 5-8 |6.7 | | |A promising young ballet student cannot afford to continue lessons when her Chinese grandmother emigrates from Hong Kong, creating jealousy and conflict among the entire family.
Chinese-Americans
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