Historical Fiction
A place to belong
Cynthia Kadohata
jFICTION Kadohata Cynthia
Fiction, Kids, Historical Fiction
Twelve-year-old Hanako and her family, reeling from their confinement in an internment camp, renounce their American citizenship to move to Hiroshima, a city devastated by the atomic bomb dropped by Americans.
My life as an ice cream sandwich
Ibi Aanu Zoboi
jFICTION Zoboi Ibi
Fiction, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Kids
Twelve-year-old Ebony-Grace Norfleet has lived with her beloved grandfather Jeremiah in Huntsville, Alabama ever since she was little. As one of the first black engineers to integrate NASA, Jeremiah has nurtured Ebony-Grace's love for all things outer space and science fiction--especially Star Wars and Star Trek. But in the summer of 1984, when trouble arises with Jeremiah, it's decided she'll spend a few weeks with her father in Harlem. Harlem is an exciting and terrifying place for a sheltered girl from Hunstville, and Ebony-Grace's first instinct is to retreat into her imagination. But soon 126th Street begins to reveal that it has more in common with her beloved sci-fi adventures than she ever thought possible, and by summer's end, Ebony-Grace discovers that Harlem has a place for a girl whose eyes are always on the stars.
This book is sad and funny, with issues of race and class and growing up navigated via Old New York and Star Trek fandom. The best! -Anne W
The secrets we kept
Lara Prescott
FICTION Prescott Lara
Historical Fiction, Fiction
At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world--using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, and under Sally's tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops, and invisibly ferry classified documents.
Oh, you need to read this book. Follow members of the CIA's "typing pool" picked to assist in the mission to get the novel Doctor Zhivago published and distributed in the Soviet Union. Their story is intertwined with Olga's, the mistress of Boris Pasternak, as she deals with the consequences of the novel's existence--it was not a favorite of the Kremlin, by any means. It is a page-turner. Also, you DO NOT need to read Doctor Zhivago to enjoy this book. However, it is a great read as well! -Anne M
Delayed rays of a star : a novel
Amanda Lee Koe
FICTION Lee Amanda
Historical Fiction
"At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous--then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysée, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice"--
Added by Becky
Augustown
Kei Miller
FICTION Miller Kei
Historical Fiction
"In the wake of Marlon James's Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustown--set in the backlands of Jamaica--is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better life"--
Added by Becky
The book woman of Troublesome Creek
Kim Michele Richardson
FICTION Richards Kim
Historical Fiction
1936. Tucked deep into the woods of Troublesome Creek, KY, lives blue-skinned Cussy Carter, the last living female of the rare Blue People ancestry. She joins Roosevelt's Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a traveling librarian, riding across slippery creek beds and up treacherous mountains on her mule to deliver books and other reading material to the impoverished hill people of Eastern Kentucky. Along her route, Cussy faces doubters at every turn, but is determined to bring the joy of books to the hardscrabble Kentuckians. -- adapted from back cover
I was surprised no one on staff had recommended this already! Set during the Great Depression, Cussy Mary is last living female of the rare Blue People ancestry, and is treated as an outcast. She joins the Roosevelt's Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a traveling librarian, riding her Mule in the mountains to deliver books and other reading material to the impoverished hill people of Troublesome Creek. I loved the historical components of the story, it gives you a real insight of the devastating poverty of the people living in Appalachia. -Mari
The Watsons go to Birmingham-- 1963
Christopher Paul Curtis
jFICTION Curtis, Christopher Paul
Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor, Kids
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
You will laugh out loud again and again until the end, when you'll cry. A family from Michigan goes to visit relatives down South in Birmingham for the summer. Ten year old Kenny, the protagonist, has a wonderful voice and spirit. -Anne W
Midnight without a moon
Linda Williams Jackson
jFICTION Jackson Linda
Fiction, Historical Fiction, Kids
Rose Lee Carter, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl, dreams of life beyond the Mississippi cotton fields during the summer of 1955, but when Emmett Till is murdered and his killers are unjustly acquitted, Rose is torn between seeking her destiny outside of Mississippi or staying and being a part of an important movement.
It's summer in Mississippi in 1955 and one town over from where Rose Lee Carter lives with her grandparents, a boy named Emmett Till is murdered. Unrest begins to build, and Rose Lee is forced to question everything she's ever known and decide whether to join a dangerous movement for change in the South. Complex, multilayered characters dealing with wider social change as well as family events. -Anne W
When you reach me
Rebecca Stead
YOUNG ADULT FICTION Stead, Rebecca
Kids, Fiction, Adventure, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery
As her mother prepares to be a contestant on the 1980s television game show, "The $20,000 Pyramid," a twelve-year-old New York City girl tries to make sense of a series of mysterious notes received from an anonymous source that seems to defy the laws of time and space.
Mix of sci-fi, mystery, and historical fiction (set in the 1970s), a middle-school girl must investigate the source of mysterious notes that appear in her personal belongings and, she realizes, predict the future. Time travel! -Anne W
The poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
FICTION Kingsolver, Barbara
Historical Fiction
"The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it―from garden seeds to Scripture―is calamitously transformed on African soil. This tale of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, is set against history's most dramatic political parables." (Amazon Summary)
This is a difficult, but important story that evaluates multiple post-colonial attitudes through the lenses of a missionary wife and her four daughters. It provides such an interesting portrait of a family and of a village in the Belgian Congo (beginning in 1959), and delves deeply into issues of culture, politics and human experience. -Becky
One Japanese-American family dealing with the aftermath of WWII and their time in an internment camp -Anne W