Historical Fiction

1. Milly and the Macy’s Parade by Shana Corey

Summary: A family starts the Macy’s Parade because they miss their Polish traditions.

2. The Memory Coat by Elvira Woodruff

Summary: A family moves to America from Russia.

3. When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest

Summary: A young European girl names Jessie travels to America, and saves up enough money so that her only family (her grandmother) can join her.

4. Coming Home Soon by Jacqueline Woodson

Summary: This is a book about a Mom who has to go to work in Chicago because it is World War II and women are needed for the war.  Leaving her daughter with her mother they miss Mom everyday.

5. My America: Our Strange New Land, Elizabeth’s Jamestown Colony Diary (Book1) by Patricia Hermes

Summary: This is a book about a girl named Elizabeth who comes over to America and lives in the first permanent English colony in Jamestown, Virginia.

6. Little House on the Prairie By Laura Ingalls Wilder

Summary: A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a fire. 

7. Number the Stars By Lois Lowry

Summary: Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It's now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. 

8. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer By Mark Twain

Summary: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain spent his own youth. A somber undercurrent flows through the high humor and unabashed nostalgia of the novel, however, for beneath the innocence of childhood lie the inequities of adult reality base emotions and superstitions, murder and revenge, starvation and slavery.

9. A Year Down Under  By Richard Peck

Summary: Mary Alice's childhood summers in Grandma Dowdel's sleepy Illinois town were packed with enough drama to fill the double bill of any picture show. But now she is fifteen, and faces a whole long year with Grandma, a woman well known for shaking up her neighbors-and everyone else!