International School of Luxembourg Libraries: ISL Libraries Book Blog

First-rate Historical Fiction

This week’s blog is a little self-indulgent as it features my own personal favourite genre of fiction - Historical Fiction.

While many authors simply use history as an elaborate stage upon which to set their stories, some do a great deal more than that. I am unable to find the source of, ‘History put to fiction can be a poem set to music,’ so I am forced to conclude that I made this truism up myself. Nevertheless, it is one that jumps to mind whenever I come across really great historical fiction. By ‘great historical fiction’ I mean the stuff that not only delights and entertains, but which really teaches us something about the past; it immerses us in the everyday characteristics of bygone years, offers us beguiling insights into emotional climates, cultural mindsets, social conditions and details of the lives of notorious figures and ordinary folks alike. In short, great historical fiction brings the past to life for us. What could be a better or easier way for our kids to learn?

Students not only enrich their knowledge of the past through well written historical fiction, but stories enriched by the imagination of the novelist, can be the very impetus that inspires an avid interest in past times in the first place. The fun may even become analytical  - spot the inconsistencies! After all, the novelist is under no obligation to tell us the truth…

Quote of the day to ponder:

EM Forster in, ‘Aspects of the Novel’, set these two statements against one another as ‘plot’ v ‘story’.  

 “The king died and then the queen died.”

 “The king died and then the queen died of grief.”

Which is plot and which is story?

Lower School

Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine; Kadir Nelson (Illustrator)

A stirring, dramatic story of a slave who mails himself to freedom by a Jane Addams Peace Award-winning author and a Coretta Scott King Award-winning artist. Henry Brown doesn't know how old he is. Nobody keeps records of slaves' birthdays. All the time he dreams about freedom, but that dream seems farther away than ever when he is torn from his family and put to work in a warehouse. Henry grows up and marries, but he is again devastated when his family is sold at the slave market. Then one day, as he lifts a crate at the warehouse, he knows exactly what he must do: He will mail himself to the North. After an arduous journey in the crate, Henry finally has a birthday, his first day of freedom.

 

 

Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti; Christophe Gallaz; Martha Coventry (Translator)

When Rose sees a little boy trying to escape from the back of a truck, only to be captured and shoved back in, she decides to follow the truck. At a desolate place out of town she discovers many other children, staring hungrily from behind an electric barbed wire fence.

 

 

 

 

 

Encounter by Jane Yolen; David Shannon (Illustrator)

When Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador in 1492, what he discovered were the Taino Indians. Told from a young Taino boy's point of view, this is a story of how the boy tried to warn his people against welcoming the strangers, who seemed more interested in golden ornaments than friendship. Years later the boy, now an old man, looks back at the destruction of his people and their culture by the colonizers.

 

 

 

Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki; Dom Lee (Illustrator)

Illustrated by Dom Lee A Japanese-American boy discovers hope and self-respect while playing baseball at an internment camp during World War II.

 

 

 

 

The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis

 When the Watson family; ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron set out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don't realize that they're heading toward one of the darkest moments in America's history. The Watsons' journey reminds us that even in the hardest times, laughter and family can help us get through anything. 

 

 

The Blackbird Girls by Anne Blankman

A poignant story of friendship that twines together moments in underexplored history. On a spring morning, neighbours Valentina and Oksana wake up to an angry red sky. A reactor at the nuclear power plant where their fathers work, Chernobyl, has exploded. Before they know it, the two girls, who've always been enemies, find themselves on a train bound for Leningrad to stay with Valentina's estranged grandmother, Rita Grigorievna. In their new lives in Leningrad, they begin to learn what it means to trust another person. Oksana must face the lies her parents told her all her life. Valentina must keep her grandmother's secret, one that could put all their lives in danger. And both of them discover something they've wished for, a best friend. But how far would you go to save your best friend's life? 

 

Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park

Prairie Lotus is a powerful, touching, multi-layered book about a girl determined to fit in and realize her dreams: getting an education, becoming a dressmaker in her father's shop, and making at least one friend. Acclaimed, award-winning author Linda Sue Park has placed a young half-Asian girl, Hanna, in a small town in America's heartland, in 1880. Hanna's adjustment to her new surroundings, which primarily means negotiating the townspeople's almost unanimous prejudice against Asians, is at the heart of the story. Narrated by Hanna, the novel has poignant moments yet sparkles with humour, introducing a captivating heroine whose wry, observant voice will resonate with readers.

 

 

 

Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Esperanza thought she'd always live with her family on their ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home, and servants. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California during the Great Depression, and to settle in a camp for Mexican farm workers. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard labour, financial struggles, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When their new life is threatened, Esperanza must find a way to rise above her difficult circumstances - Mama's life, and her own, depend on it.

 

The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Ten-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada's twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn't waste a minute, she sneaks out to join him.   So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan, and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime? Or will Ada and her brother fall back into the cruel hands of their mother?   

 

 

Upper School

 

The Book Thief by Markus Zusa

Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. 

 

 

 

 

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize* Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. 

 

 

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

In her bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood masterfully took us to a chilling world of the future. In her astonishing new novel Alias Grace, she just as convincingly takes us back 150 years and inside the life and mind of one of the most notorious women of the 1840s. Grace Marks is serving a life sentence for her part in the vicious murders of Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy landowner, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself now claims to have no memory of the murders. Simon Jordan, a young New England doctor in the field of mental health and an expert on amnesia, has been engaged to find out the truth. To do so, he must awaken that part of Grace's mind that lies dormant, using the practices of the science he has such great faith in.

 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

Recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Winner of Winners" award With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor's beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover's charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna's willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

 

 

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII. . . . Magnificent." (The Boston Globe).