Historical Fiction Novel List

English III-Honors

The Storytellerby jodi picoult

Sage Singer is a baker, a loner, until she befriends an old man who's

particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is

everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he

asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses—and then he

confesses his darkest secret – he deserves to die because he had

been a Nazi SS guard. And Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.

How do you react to evil living next door? Can someone who's

committed truly heinous acts ever atone with subsequent good

behavior? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? And, if Sage even considers the request, is

it revenge…or justice?

Theme: Holocaust

Orphan trainBy Christina Baker-Kline

Theme: World War II

Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to “aging out” out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse…As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.Molly discovers that she has the power to help Vivian find answers to mysteries that have haunted her for her entire life – answers that will ultimately free them both.

The Book Thiefby MarKus Zusak

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath.

Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who

scratches out a meager existence for herself by

stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her

accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with

her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the

Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Theme: Holocaust/World War II

Sarah’s KeyBy Tatiana de Rosnay

Theme: Holocaust/World War II

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

The Kitchen HouseBy Kathleen Grissom

Theme: Slavery

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

Someone Knows My Name

By Lawrence HIll

Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned their freedom in Nova Scotia. But the hardship and prejudice of the new colony prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people.

Theme: Slavery/Revolutionary War

The Secret Life of Bees

By Sue Monk Kidd

It tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed.

When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's most vicious racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming power of love—a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

Theme: Civil Rights Movement

The Things They CarriedBy Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company:

Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders,

Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at

the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it

has become required reading for any American and continues to

challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction,

war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

Theme: Vietnam War

Purple HeartBy Patricia McCormick

Theme: Iraqi War

When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero.There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces together.Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf, and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was. But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is guilty is very complicated indeed.

I Pledge Allegianceby Chris Lynch

Four best friends. Four ways to serve their country.

Morris, Rudi, Ivan, and Beck are best friends for life. So when one of the

teens is drafted into the Vietnam War, the others sign up, too. Although they each serve in a different branch, they

are fighting the war together--and they pledge to do all they can to come

home together.Haunted by dreams of violence and death, Morris makes it his personal

mission to watch over his friends--and the best place to do that is in the US

Navy. Stationed off the coast of Vietnam on the USS Boston, Morris

and his fellow sailors provide crucial support to the troops on the ground.But the Boston itself isn't safe from

attack. And as Morris finds his courage and resolve tested like never before,

he keeps coming back to a single thought.

He made a pledge. He must keep them safe.

Theme: Vietnam War

The MarchBy E.L. Doctorow

In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant.

Theme: Civil War

TallgrassBy Sandra Dallas

During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down

when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in

their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all

eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the

strangers.This is Tallgrass as Rennie

Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and,

until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told

her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of

change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most

sacred things.

Theme: Japanese Internment Camps

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

By Jamie Ford

Henry Lee is a 12-year-old Chinese boy who falls in love with Keiko Okabe, a 12-year-old Japanese girl, while they are scholarship students at a prestigious private school in World War II Seattle. Henry hides the relationship from his parents, who would disown him if they knew he had a Japanese friend. His father insists that Henry wear an "I am Chinese" button everywhere he goes because Japanese residents of Seattle have begun to be shipped off by the thousands to relocation centers. This is an old-fashioned historical novel that alternates between the early 1940s and 1984, after Henry's wife Ethel has died of cancer.

Theme: JapaneseInternment Camps

The Buddha in the Attic

By Julie Otsuka

It tells the story of a group of young women brought from

Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a

century ago. In eight unforgettable sections, The

Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous

journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their

tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences

raising children who would later reject their culture and

language, to the deracinating arrival of war. Once again, Julie

Otsuka has written a spellbinding novel about

identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in

uncertain times.

Theme: Japanese Mail Order Brides

Weedflowerby Cynthia Kadohata

When Pearl Harbor is attacked, the lives of a Japanese-American girl and her family are

thrown into chaos. Sumiko, 12, and her younger brother, Tak-Tak, live with their aunt and uncle, grandfather Jiichan, and

adult cousins on a flower farm in Southern California. Though often busy with chores, Sumiko enjoys working with the blossoms,

particularly stock, or weedflowers (fragrant plants grown in a field). In the difficult days

that follow the bombing, the family members fear for their safety and destroy many of their belongings. Then Uncle and

Jiichan are taken to a prison camp, and the others are eventually sent to an assembly center at a racetrack, where they live in a horse stable. When they're moved to the

Arizona desert, Sumiko misses the routine of her old life and struggles with despair.

New friends help; she grows a garden with her neighbor and develops a tender

relationship with a Mohave boy. She learns from him that the camp is on land taken

from the Mohave reservation and finds that the tribe's plight parallels that of the

incarcerated Japanese Americans.

Theme: Japanese Internment Camps/Native American Culture

RagtimeBy E.L. Doctorow

Theme: Early 1900s

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an

affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape

artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their

house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact,

between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford,

Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano

Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's

imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant

peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of

justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

The Devil in the White City

By Erik Larson

Erik Larson intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death.

Theme: World’s Fair 1893

The CrucibleBy Arthur Miller

A classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in

seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. In the rigid

theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing

witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and

suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor

of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and

townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial.

The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness

of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate

the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.

Theme: Salem Witch Trials/Red Scare

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

Theme: Stem Cells/Cloning

*Nonfiction Novel

A Bride Most BegrudgingBy Deeanne Gist

When Lady Constance Morrow finds herself held against her will aboard a ship bound for the American colonies, a ship filled with "tobacco brides" and felons, she is quite sure that as soon as she arrives she will find a reasonable man who will believe her father is an earl and send her back on the next ship to England. Instead, she meets Drew O'Connor, a determined Colonial farmer who is nearly as headstrong as she is. Drew wins Constance as his bride but soon realizes he has taken on much more than he bargained for.

Theme: Colonial America

Fly By NightBy Ward Larsen

A top-secret drone crashes in the lawless Horn of Africa. The CIA is prepared to write off the

loss, until evidence surfaces that the wreckage of their prized aircraft is hidden in a hangar

outside Khartoum's main airport. The hangar is owned by a shady cargo airline that flies

ancient DC-3s across Africa and the Middle East. The name of the company does nothing

to still concern: FBN-Fly by Night Aviation. The U.S. government must find out what is in the

hangar, and when an FBN airplane crashes, the opportunity arises for the National

Transportation Safety Board to send an investigator to get to the bottom of things.

Jammer Davis is the NTSB's biggest headache, but also its best solo operator. He goes to

Sudan in the name of solving an air crash, but with the true aim of locating the priceless remains of America's latest technological marvel. As Davis enters this inhospitable

world, he finds the two disparate mysteries strangely intertwined. True to his nature, Davis

barges ahead. Yet everything he finds takes him in reverse.

Theme: Military Aviation in Middle East and Africa

Cutting For StoneBy Abraham Verghese

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a

beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon.

Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s

disappearance, bound together by a preternatural

connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as

Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Theme: Ethiopian culture

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she has written a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on the fan and compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together they endure the agony of footbinding and reflect upon their arranged marriages, their loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace in their friendship, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their relationship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Theme: Chinese Coming of Age

The Space Between UsBy Thrity Umrigar

A poignant novel about a wealthy woman and her

downtrodden servant, it offers a revealing look at class and

gender roles in modern day Bombay. Alternatively told

through the eyes of Sera, a Parsi widow whose pregnant

daughter and son-in-law share her elegant home, and Bhima,

the elderly housekeeper who must support her orphaned

granddaughter, Umrigar does a great job of creating two

sympathetic characters whose bond goes far deeper than that

of employer and employee.

Theme: Indian class system

Angela’s AshesBy Frank McCourt

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn

to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's

mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy,

rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy-- exasperating, �

irresponsible and beguiling-- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he

can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved

Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for

Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner

and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-

starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell

his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Theme: Irish poverty

*Nonfiction Novel