Historical Fiction

What is Historical Fiction?

• Realistic fiction set in a time far enough away
from the present to be considered history.
•Story is imaginary but within the realm of
possibility and constructed around actual historical
facts.
•Brings history to life by putting appealing child
characters in accurately described historical
settings.
•Tells stories of characters’ everyday lives as well as
their triumphs and failures.
•Makes history more real and more memorable.
In 1925, fourteen-year-old
Ida Bidson secretly takes
over as the teacher when the
one-room schoolhouse in her
remote Colorado area closes
unexpectedly.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.1
Point Value: 3.0
Falsely accused of theft
and murder, an orphaned
peasant boy in fourteenth-
century England flees his
village and meets a larger-
than-life juggler who
holds a dangerous secret.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.0
Point Value: 7.0
In wartime Brooklyn in
1943, eleven-year-old
Howie Crispers mounts a
campaign to save his
favorite teacher from
being fired.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 3.6
Point Value: 4.0
In a series of poems,
fifteen-year-old Billie Jo
relates the hardships of
living on her family's
wheat farm in Oklahoma
during the dust bowl years
of the Depression.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.3
Point Value: 3.0
When a terrible blight
attacks Ireland's potato
crop in 1845, twelve-year-
old Nory Ryan's courage
and ingenuity helps her
family and neighbors
survive.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.3
Point Value: 5.0
A fictionalized account of
the Pakistani child who
escaped from bondage in a
carpet factory and went on
to help liberate other
children like him before
being gunned down at the
age of thirteen.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.1
Point Value: 4.0
Kidnapped by the crew of
an Africa bound ship, a
thirteen-year-old boy
discovers to his horror that
he is on a slaver and his job
is to play music for the
exercise periods of the
human cargo.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 6.0
Point Value: 6.0
Rifka, a young Jewish girl,
writes to her cousin,
chronicling her family's
experiences fleeing Russia
in 1919, and her own trials
after being left in Belgium
on her own while the others
emigrate to America.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.2
Point Value: 4.0
Story of an African-
American family living
in Mississippi during the
Depression of the 1930s,
whose children do not
understand the prejudice
and discrimination aimed
at them.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.7
Point Value: 10.0
Philip, an adolescent white
boy who is blinded in a
torpedo attack at sea during
World War II, acquires a new
type of vision, courage, and
love when he is stranded on
a tiny Caribbean island with
Timothy, a kind, elderly
black man.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.3
Point Value: 4.0
In 1943, during the German
occupation of Denmark,
ten-year-old Annemarie
learns how to be brave and
courageous when she helps
shelter her Jewish friend
from the Nazis.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.5
Point Value: 4.0
As English armies invade
Scotland in 1306, eleven-year-
old Princess Marjorie,
daughter of the newly
crowned Scottish king, Robert
the Bruce, is captured by
England's King Edward
Longshanks and held in a
cage on public display.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.9
Point Value: 9.0
Thirteen-year-old Koly
enters into an ill-fated
arranged marriage and
must either suffer a
destiny dictated by India's
customs or find the
courage to oppose
tradition.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.3
Point Value: 5.0
In 1886 in Alabama, an
eleven-year-old African
American girl and her
family befriend and give
refuge to a runaway
Apache boy.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.9
Point Value: 4.0
While her father is in hiding
after attempts on his life,
twelve-year-old Cleopatra
records in her diary how she
fears for her own safety and
hopes to survive to become
Queen of Egypt some day.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 6.2
Point Value: 6.0
The ordinary interactions and
everyday routines of the
Watsons, an African-
American family living in
Flint, Michigan, are
drastically changed after they
go to visit Grandma in
Alabama in the summer of
1963.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.0
Point Value: 8.0
In 1687 in Connecticut,
Kit Tyler, feeling out of
place in the Puritan
household of her aunt,
befriends an old woman
considered a witch by the
community and suddenly
finds herself standing trial
for witchcraft.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level:
Point Value:
Ten-year-old Bud, a
motherless boy living in Flint,
Michigan, during the Great
Depression, escapes a bad
foster home and sets out in
search of the man he believes
to be his father--the renowned
bandleader, H.E. Calloway of
Grand Rapids.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.0
Point Value: 8.0
 Prince Brat deserves his name--he
causes trouble at every possible
opportunity. Luckily for him it's
forbidden to strike a prince, so the
palace keeps a whipping boy.
Jemmy, plucked from the sewers to
become the royal whipping boy,
dreams of returning to his life as a
rat-catcher. One night the prince
decides to run away and orders
Jemmy to join him. The two boys
embark on a comical series of
Accelerated Reader misadventures that include two
Reading Level: 3.9 murderous highwaymen, a dancing
bear, and a journey through the
Point Value: 2.0 rat-infested sewers beneath the city.
Left alone to guard the
family's wilderness home
in eighteenth-century
Maine, a boy is hard-
pressed to survive until
local Indians teach him
their skills.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.9
Point Value: 5.0
Thirteen-year-old Rosie and
members of her family travel from
their Illinois farm to Chicago in
1893 to visit Aunt Euterpe and
attend the World's Columbian
Exposition which, along with an
encounter with Buffalo Bill and
Lillian Russell, turns out to be a
life-changing experience for
everyone.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.7
Point Value: 4.0
Told in the voices of eleven
characters, about two young
girls, one Jewish and the
other African-American,
who come to the attention of
the newly formed Ku Klux
Klan in a small Vermont
town in 1924.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.0
Point Value: 2.0
When their father invites a
mail-order bride to come
live with them in their
prairie home, Caleb and
Anna are captivated by their
new mother and hope that
she will stay.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 3.4
Point Value: 1.0
Sequel to: Sarah, plain and
tall. When a drought tests the
commitment of a mail-order
bride from Maine to her new
home on the prairie, her
stepchildren hope they will be
able to remain a family.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 3.2
Point Value: 1.0
In thirteenth-century China, after
trying to save his widowed mother
from a horrendous second
marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou
has life-changing adventures when
he takes to the sky as a circus kite
rider and ends up meeting the
great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 6.5
Point Value: 10.0
Dear America Diary
Series
In her diary, thirteen-year-old
Hattie chronicles her family's
arduous 1847 journey from
Missouri to Oregon on the
Oregon Trail.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.5
Point Value: 4.0
A fictional journal in which
eleven-year-old Minnie
Swift tells how her family
dealt with the difficult times
during the Depression and
how the arrival of an orphan
from Texas changed their
lives in Indianapolis just
before Christmas 1932.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.4
Point Value: 5.0
Twelve-year-old Amber
Billows, upset to be moving
once again to follow her
father's reporting job, cannot
help loving Hawaii, but the
peace of her tropical paradise
is shattered on December 7,
1941, when the Japanese
bomb Pearl Harbor.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.6
Point Value: 3.0
Thirteen-year-old C.J. records
in a journal the conditions of
the Dust Bowl that cause the
Jackson family to leave their
farm in Oklahoma and make
the difficult journey to
California, where they find a
harsh life as migrant workers.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.7
Point Value: 5.0
Thirteen-year-old Madeline's
diaries for 1941 and 1942
reveal her experiences living
on Long Island during World
War II while her father is
away in the Navy.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.5
Point Value: 4.0
A fictional journal kept by
twelve-year-old Augustus
Pelletier, the youngest member
of Lewis and Clark's Corps of
Discovery.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.6
Point Value: 5.0
Twelve-year-old Zippy, a
Jewish immigrant from
Russia, keeps a diary account
of the first eighteen months of
her family's life on the Lower
East Side of New York City
in 1903-1904.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.5
Point Value: 4.0
Eleven-year-old Nellie Lee
Love records in her diary the
events of 1919, when her
family moves from
Tennessee to Chicago,
hoping to leave the racism
and hatred of the South
behind.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 4.9
Point Value: 5.0
A diary account of fourteen-
year-old Susanna Fairchild's
life in 1849, when her father
succumbs to gold fever on
the way to establish his
medical practice in Oregon
after losing his wife and
money on their steamship
journey from New York.
Includes a historical note.

Accelerated Reader
Reading Level: 5.5
Point Value: 5.0