Library History

“A gripping saga of wartime survival.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Based on a true story, this World War II novel by Scott O’Dell Award winner Graham Salisbury tells how Zenji, 17, is sent from Hawaii to the Philippines to spy on the Japanese. Zenji Watanabe was born in Hawaii. He’s an...

A tumultuous tale of the student-led 1956 Hungarian revolution—and an all too timely look at the impact of Communism and the USSR in Eastern Europe—set in a fabulist, colorless post-WWII Budapest from Sydney Taylor Honor winner Katherine Locke. “A haunting, beautiful read that centers...

For fans of Ruta Septys and Monica Hesse comes a lush historical mystery set in post-World War II America against the flashy backdrop of Hollywood's film studios about a shocking murder that threatens to unearth the ghosts of a young German immigrant's past. Hollywood, 1946. The war is over, and...

If you love The Great Gatsby, you'll want to read the Flappers series. Power . . . love . . . scandal . . . there’s never enough to go around. In the city that never sleeps, Lorraine Dyer is wide awake. Ever since she exposed Clara Knowles for the tramp she was—and lost her closest...

This compelling addition to the What Was? series covers what was supposed to be “the war to end all wars” but tragically wasn't. In 1914, the assassination of an Austrian archduke set off a disastrous four-year-long conflict involving dozens of countries with battles taking place in all...

From the world of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls comes a story based on the life of Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first female self-made millionaire. Sarah is the first person in her family who wasn’t born into slavery in Delta, Louisiana. But being free doesn’t mean that Sarah...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was only 25 when he helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was soon organizing black people across the country in support of the right to vote, desegregation, and other basic civil rights. Maintaining nonviolent and peaceful tactics even when his life was...

Born to Fly is the gripping story of the fearless women pilots who aimed for the skies--and beyond. Just nine years after American women finally got the right to vote, a group of trailblazers soared to new heights in the 1929 Air Derby, the first women's air race across the U.S. Follow the...

We can all be heroes. That’s the inspiring message of this New York Times bestselling biography series from historian and author Brad Meltzer. Learn all about Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee scientist. Each entry in this series is a biography of a significant historical figure, told in a...

From two-time Newbery medalist and living legend Lois Lowry comes a moving account of the lives lost in two of WWII’s most infamous events: Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima Lois Lowry looks back at history through a personal lens as she draws from her own memories as a child in Hawaii and Japan, as...

They call Gabriela "Tree Girl". Gabi climbs trees to be within reach of the eagles and watch the sun rise into an empty sky. She is at home among the outstretched branches of the Guatemalan forests. Then one day from the safety of a tree, Gabi witnesses the sights and sounds of an unspeakable massacre. She vows to be Tree Girl no more and joins the hordes of refugees struggling to reach the Mexican border. She has lost her whole family; her entire village has been wiped out.

When a petty thief falls though a glass roof in his attempt to escape from the police, what should have been the death of him marks the beginning of a while new life. After his broken body is reconstructed by an ambitious young doctor, he is released from prison, and, with the help of Victorian London's extensive sewer system, he becomes the most elusive burglar in the city.

Sadie Wynn doesn't want a new life; her old one suits her just fine. But times are hard in drought-plagued Missouri, and Daddy thinks they'll be better off in Texas. Sadie hates this strange new place, where even children must work at the cannery to help make ends meet and people are rude to her disabled father. Yet when trouble comes, it is the kindness of these new neighbors that helps the family make it through.

Claude Monet is considered one of the most influential artists of all time. He is a founder of the French Impressionist art movement, and today his paintings sell for millions of dollars. While Monet was alive, however, his work was often criticized and he struggled financially. With over one...

Read all about how a young boy from California who listened to polka music and played the accordion became a comedian, parody songwriter, and Grammy winner in this biography for young readers about “Weird Al” Yankovic! When Alfred Yankovic was seven years old, a salesman knocked on the door...

In 1985, four American musicians—members of a New England-based klezmer band that focused on Yiddish music—landed in Moscow. With little training in espionage, they risked their freedom and their lives to smuggle information to and from the West under the watchful eye of the KGB and to help...

A farm-working girl with big dreams meets activist Dolores Huerta and joins the 1965 protest for workers’ rights in this tender-hearted novel in verse, perfect for fans of Rita Williams-Garcia and Pam Muñoz Ryan. Lula Viramontes aches to one day become someone whom no one can ignore: a daring...

"Alice + Freda Forever is a gut-wrenching story of love, death, and the dangers of intolerance."--Bustle In 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn't her crime that shocked the nation--it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man...

The United States of America is almost 250 years old, but American women won the right to vote less than a hundred years ago. And when the controversial nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution-the one granting suffrage to women-was finally ratified in 1920, it passed by a mere one-vote...

It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one.