Historical Fiction for Kids
Great chapter book reads that bring the past to life! (Updated April 2025)
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Black Star
Charley is a 12-year-old Black girl growing up in the time of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration and the Negro Baseball Leagues – and her dream is to become a professional baseball pitcher.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Rebellion 1776
13-year-old Elsbeth searches for her missing father, as the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston during the American Revolution.
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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Across So Many Seas
Spanning more than 500 years, this traces the immigrant journeys of four 12-year-old Sephardic Jewish girls from different generations of the same family.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Night War
After she’s separated from her family and forced into hiding, 12-year-old Miriam helps other Jewish people escape WWII Nazi-occupied France
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Danilo Was Here
In the aftermath of the US military invasion of Panamá, Danilo is recruited to play youth baseball in California – so he reluctantly leaves his mother and sister in a refugee camp, to try and help his family.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Essie and the March on Selma
12-year-old Essie believes that Black people should be allowed to vote, and she’s willing to march for that right.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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One Big Open Sky
In the 1870s, an African American girl and her family undertake a perilous wagon journey westward, hoping to find freedom out west
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Buffalo Dreamer
When visiting her family on the Cree reservation in northern Alberta, Canada, 12-year-old Summer begins to have strange, powerful dreams about an Indigenous girl named Buffalo Dreamer, who is fleeing a residential school. When unmarked graves are found at a nearby residential school, Summer wonders if her dreams are connected to this devastating history.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Secret of Honeycake
In 1930s Maine, 11-year-old Hurricane’s older sister and guardian is sent away for tuberculosis treatment, so she goes to live with her severe Great-Aunt Claire in the city. Luckily, Hurricane finds comfort in her writing and in new friends.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Max in the House of Spies
Evacuated from Berlin on the Kindertransport in 1939, Jewish 11-year-old Max will do anything to get back to his parents – even becoming a British spy in Nazi Germany
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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