Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
One Big Open Sky by Lesa Kline-Ransom (March 2024, Holiday House) is a free verse historical fiction novel about Black covered wagon pioneers in 1879. It features a young Black girl and her family, told from her perspective and that of her mother and another young woman. They journey from a sharecropping atmosphere in Mississippi
It is not often that I hear of a “new” book by a classic author, but Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston never was published during her lifetime due to the subject matter: interviews from the 1920s with one of the last enslaved people from Africa. Finally, it was published in 2018. Now, Ibram X. Kendi
Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, September 2023) is a unique and personal account of the author’s search for her genealogical roots. As Alex Haley did for his adult novelization of his ancestor’s stories, Weatherford travels to Africa and scours census records and
The 2023 middle grade novel Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson (Little Brown Books for Young Readers, February 2022) offers a hopeful and dream-like success for two children fleeing slavery. Just as they feel hope of escape ebbing away, a mystery man rescues them, leading them to an island community on the edge of the swamp. Homer’s
In the middle-grade novel Indigo and Ida by Heather Murphy Capps (Carolrhoda Books, April 2023), teenager Indigo Fitzgerald discovers a biography (with loose personal letters) about the nineteenth-century investigative writer Ida B. Wells. As she reads of Ida’s reporting on frequent lynchings in the South during the post-Reconstruction era, Indigo is inspired to focus her
The historical fiction novel The Paper Daughters of Chinatown (which has been adapted for young readers) by Heather B. Moore and Allison Hong Merrill (Shadow Mountain, April 2023) is based on the lives of two women, Donaldina Cameron and the young Tien Fu Wu. Dolly was a young charismatic woman hoping to help the unfortunate
In the book Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park (Clarion Books, March 2020), Hanna loved her mom. She had taught Hanna to sew. But when her mom dies, Hanna and her father move to a different town. Hanna really wanted to go to school but when she went to school people teased her because she
Hi. I’m gonna tell you about a book, but not just any book. Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan (HarperCollins, May 1981. It’s about a family who needs a mother, but Anna and Caleb, the kids, wonder if Sarah, the new mother will stay. She misses her home, the ocean, and her family. In
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (Doubleday, March 1976) is a truly powerful book. It follows the life of one man’s descendants, beginning in the mid-1700s, and following through to the author himself. The most amazing thing is that all of it was based on a family story passed down for
If there is any president of the United States that I have both disgust and intrigue for, it is Andrew Jackson, the southern president who completely changed the face of the presidency from upper class elite to “man of the people.” A president who approved and carried out the first of many Native American relocations
The Left Behinds series so far contains two different historical fiction novels with time travel adventures in which preteens must save the day. In The iPhone that Saved George Washington, three kids travel to 1776 to discover that George Washington has been shot. Can they reverse this alternate history before history is changed forever? In Abe
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink is a 1930s Newbery Award Winner, based on the experiences of the author’s own grandmother. Caddie is a creative and active 11-year-old, resistant to the demands her nineteenth-century culture demands of her because she is a girl. In this fictionalized volume of adventures, Caddie’s fun occasionally brings her into
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