Titles Worth Trying: Historical Fiction [Grades K-2]

Told from the viewpoint of the First Cat of the White House, this clever picture book takes readers on a tour of this historic residence where they will find out who really runs things around there.

Polly misses her father, a soldier fighting in France during World War I, and at home everything is rationed; Polly wants to do her part to help, so she and her friends organize a parade to collect peach pits which are used in the manufacture of gas masks.

Junia, a dedicated mule with an important job, assists in delivering books and reading material to people in the Kentucky hills and woods during the Great Depression.

A young girl leaves her beloved doll behind when she must make the journey from India to Pakistan in the aftermath of their partition by the British government.

"Every day, more and more people fleeing war in the north show up at Kyung Tak and her family's house on the southeastern shore of Korea. With nowhere else to go, the Taks' home is these migrants' last chance of refuge "before falling into the sea," and the household quickly becomes crowded, hot, and noisy. Then war sirens cry out over Kyung's city too, and her family and their guests take shelter underground. When the sirens stop, Kyung is upset--she...

"Five children, from five different cultures and in five different decades, grow up in the same building on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jenny Epstein and her family arrive on a steamship from Russia in the 1910s. Jenny writes letters in Yiddish to her grandmother, while practicing her English in her new neighborhood. By the 1930s, when Anna Cozzi and her Italian family move into the building, Jenny has become a teacher in Anna's school....

"Kaya is a Nez Perce girl who takes pride in helping out and supporting the tribe--and also in her beloved horse, Steps High. But when she chooses racing her horse over family responsibilities, Kaya has to prove herself to earn her tribe's respect. Kaya's story of adventure in the wilderness is sure to engage today's readers as they learn what it was like to be a Native American girl in 1764 in this Step 3 Step into Reading leveled reader. Great for...

The young man known as Teach secretly learned to read, write, and use numbers growing up alongside the master's son. And although on this Southern plantation these are skills he can never flaunt, Teach doesn't keep them to himself: In the course of a week, he'll teach little ones the alphabet in the corner stall of a stable and hold a moonlit session where men scratch letters in the dirt. He'll decipher a discarded letter bearing news of Yankee soldiers...

In a park of Regency-era London, Penelope, a little pug, gets separated from her Lady and is found by Lady Diggleton, so Penelope does her best to mind her manners in order to stay with her new Lady.

"To fall in love is already a gift. But to fall in love in a place like Minidoka, a place built to make people feel like they weren't human--that was miraculous. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Tama is sent to live in a War Relocation Center in the desert. All Japanese Americans from the West Coast--elderly people, children, babies--now live in prison camps like Minidoka. To be who she is has become a crime, it seems, and Tama doesn't know when...