2006 NYPL Books for the Teen Age (Historical Fiction)
Explore the 2006 NYPL Books for the Teen Age list featuring top historical fiction picks for teens. Discover captivating stories and must-read novels curated by the New York Public Library.
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Zorro
by Isabel Allende
A child of two worlds -- the son of an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner and a Shoshone warrior woman -- young Diego de la Vega cannot silently bear the brutal injustices visited upon the helpless in late-eighteenth-century California. And so a great hero is born -- skilled in athleticism and dazzling swordplay, his persona formed between the Old World and the New -- the legend known as Zorro.
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Fever 1793
by Laurie Halse Anderson
An epidemic of fever sweeps through the streets of 1793 Philadelphia in this novel from Laurie Halse Anderson where "the plot rages like the epidemic itself" (The New York Times Book Review). During the summer of 1793, Mattie Cook lives above the family coffee shop with her widowed mother and grandfather. Mattie spends her days avoiding chores and making plans to turn the family business into the finest Philadelphia has ever seen. But then the fever breaks out. Disease sweeps the streets, destroying everything in its path and turning Mattie's world upside down. At her feverish mother's insistence, Mattie flees the city with her grandfather. But she soon discovers that the sickness is everywhere, and Mattie must learn quickly how to survive in a city turned frantic with disease.
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Tiger, Tiger
by Lynne Reid Banks
Two tiger cub brothers are taken from the jungle to ancient Rome, where one becomes the pampered pet of Caesar's daughter and the other becomes a man-eating "entertainment act" at the Colosseum.
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Last Dance on Holladay Street
by Elisa Lynn Carbone
In 1878, thirteen-year-old Eva seeks her birth mother in Colorado, only to find the city and her mother are not what she imagined.
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Bread and Dreams
by Jonatha Ceely
Pursuing her dream of building a new life for herself, Mina heads for America in 1848 to seek her fortune in New York City and to locate her long-lost brother, struggling all the while with her growing feelings for her companion, Mr. Serle.
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Mississippi Trial, 1955
by Chris Crowe
Winner of the 2003 International Reading Association Award for Young Adult Novel. This gripping read is based on the true events of the murder of Emmett Till, one of the nation's most notorious crimes that helped spark the Civil Rights Movement. At first Hiram is excited to visit his hometown in Mississippi. But soon after he arrives, he crosses paths with Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who is also visiting for the summer. Hiram sees firsthand how the local whites mistreat blacks who refuse to "know their place." When Emmett's tortured dead body is found floating in a river, Hiram is determined to find out who could do such a thing. But what will it cost him to know?
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A Northern Light
by Jennifer Donnelly
Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," this Printz Honor Book effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, real, and wholly original.
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Blood Red Horse
by K. M. Grant
A special horse named Hosanna changes the lives of two English brothers and those around them as they fight with King Richard I against Saladin's armies during the Third Crusades.
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Shakespeare's Daughter
by Peter W. Hassinger
Susanna Shakespeare yearns to travel to London like her father, to experience the world of actors and poets and to follow her own dream of singing, a path usually followed only by men.
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Witness
by Karen Hesse
The characters in a Vermont town, both adult and children, tell from their perspectives the effect that the Ku Klux Klan has in the town.
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The Foretelling
by Alice Hoffman
Growing up the daughter of an Amazon queen who shuns her, Rain rebels against the ways of her tribe through her sister-like relationship with Io and her feelings for a boy from a tribe of wanderers.
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Hitch
by Jeanette Ingold
To help his family during the Depression and avoid becoming a drunk like his father, Moss Trawnley joins the Civilian Conservation Corps, helps build a new camp near Monroe, Montana, and leads the other men in making the camp a success.
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Dead Reckoning
by Laurie Lawlor
Emmet, a fifteen-year-old orphan, learns hard lessons about survival when he sails from England in 1577 as a servant aboard the Golden Hind.
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B for Buster
by Iain Lawrence
Kak is underage when he joins the Air Force during WWII. Kak soon learns that the war is nothing like his comic-book adventures.
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Smiler's Bones
by Peter Lerangis
Provides the story of an Eskimo boy who, after being brought from his home in Greenland to New York City by explorer Robert Peary, was forced to deal with the death of his father, and the loss of everything familiar to him.
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Day of Tears
by Julius Lester
Through flashbacks, foreshadowing, and shifting first-person points of view, readers will travel with Emma and others through time and space. They come to discover that every decision has its consequences, and final judgment is passed down not by man, but by his maker.
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Catch a Tiger by the Toe
by Ellen Levine
In the Bronx, New York, during the McCarthy era, twelve-year-old Jamie keeps a terrible secret about her family, but when the truth is exposed, her parents lose their jobs and she is fired from the school newspaper.
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Not the End of the World
by Geraldine McCaughrean
Everyone knows the story of the Flood, the men God chose to survive, the animals that went in two by two. But what about the others that sailed on the Ark - the women and the children? This adventure story asks what it was really like when the heavens opened and the world drowned - and what might have happened in the days that followed. With a frighteningly zealous and single-minded Noah; Japheth and his young wife, Zillah, concerned for the welfare of the animals; the stowaway boy and baby found by Noah's daughter Timna; and the animals themselves, continuing to act as animals do, whatever their surroundings, this is an extremely compelling and at times very frightening story, beautifully written as ever by Geraldine McCaughrean.
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Shackleton's Stowaway
by Victoria McKernan
On October 26, 1914, Ernest Shackleton's Endurance set sail from Buenos Aires in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in exploration: the crossing of the Antarctic continent. The crew stood on deck to watch the city fade away. All but one. Eighteen-year-old Perce Blackborow hid below in a locker. But the thrill of stowing away with the legendary explorer would soon turn to fear. Within months, the Endurance, trapped and crushed by ice, sank. And even Perce, the youngest member of the stranded crew, knew there was no hope of rescue. If the men were to survive in the most hostile place on earth, they would have to do it on their own. Victoria McKernan deftly weaves the hard-to-fathom facts of this famous voyage into an epic, edge-of-your-seat survival novel.
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Marie, Dancing
by Carolyn Meyer
In Stratford-upon-Avon in the sixteenth century, Anne Hathaway suffers her stepmother's cruelty and yearns for love and escape, finally finding it in the arms of a boy she has grown up with, William Shakespeare.
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Peter Raven Under Fire
by Michael Molloy
When Napoleon Bonaparte makes a pact with a murderous pirate to add America to his empire, Royal Navy midshipman Peter Raven and a swashbuckling secret agent Commodore Beaumont must do whatever it takes to put a stop to one of history's most audacious plots.
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Pirates!
by Celia Rees
In 1722, after arriving in Jamaica where she is to be married off, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kington escapes with her slave friend, Minerva Sharpe, and together they become pirates traveling the world in search of treasure.
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Montmorency
by Eleanor Updale
Fleeing across a roof on a dark night in Victorian London, a thief crashes through a glass skylight to almost certain death. But an ambitious young doctor revives and reconstructs his shattered body, proudly showing off his handiwork at the Scientific Society where the city's intelligentsia meet. It's there that the robber picks up the key to a new existence, and on his release from prison begins to lead a double life. He becomes both the respectable, wealthy Montmorency and his degenerate servant, Scarper - while the police are baffled by a wave of mysterious and seemingly unstoppable thefts... But Montmorency must be on his guard at every moment. The smallest mistake could reveal his secret and destroy both his lives.
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Black Storm Comin'
by Diane L. Wilson
Diane Lee Wilson is the author of "Black Storm Comin', " a "Booklist" Editors' Choice, a "VOYA" Top Shelf Fiction Pick and a "Book Links" Lasting Connection, and "Firehorse," which received a starred review in "Booklist, " a "Booklist" Top Ten Mystery/Suspense for Youth, and a winner of the ALA Amelia Bloomer Project. She has always ridden horses and has an extensive collection of horse books in her home in Escondido, California.