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Set primarily in Virginia, L.S. Stratton’s recent historical fiction novel, Sundown Girls tells the story of the Stoakes family whose daughter Camryn was stolen from them when she was a baby. Now, fifteen years later, after living with a loving mother who is now in jail for kidnapping, Naomi Ward is struggling to accpet her new reality or to adjust.  Hoping to help her heal with time in nature, the Stoakes rent a cabin in Sparksburg, Virginia.  However, the retreat turns into a less than relaxing experience. Upon the family’s arrival in Sparksburg, they are met with hostility from certain community members who resent theRead More →

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Randy Ribay, an author who writes through the lens of experience as a Filipino, shares tremendous history in his novel Everything We Never Had. Telling his story from multiple perspectives, Ribay provides the reader with insight into the Manong Generation, the Watsonville riots, Stockton’s Little Manila, the Delano grape strike, the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr., and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The story opens in 1929 when Francisco Maghabol is sixteen years old. Believing in the Land of Opportunity, Francisco comes to the United States from Manila in the Philippines by way of Japan toRead More →

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Just as William Blake, in his poem “The Tyger,” explores the duality of human nature and our potential for both good and evil, SF Said takes up the task in his novel Tyger illustrated by Dave McKean.  Although the novel is targeted for middle grade readers, its themes, morals, and complexity suit a much broader readership. Both the poem and the novel ultimately suggest that the imagination is the location of a miraculous but dangerous kind of creative strength. The willingness to “dare,” as the poem would put it, to create anything of any worth out of the “fire” of creativity, requires both bravery andRead More →

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Steve Watkins takes on the tough topic of the Holocaust in his book Stolen by Night. Inventing characters like Nicolette and Jules but staying true to the history of occupied Paris during World War II, Watkins tells his horror tale from the perspective of the French Resistance. Nicolette and Jules are two fourteen year old youth who love bicycling and hope to race someday as their fathers did. To live out her dream, Nicolette cuts her hair and plans to enter the upcoming thirty kilometer race disguised as a boy wearing her papa’s racing jersey. Watkins includes various scenes of Rollfast and Favor bicycles andRead More →

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Whether you work your fingers to the bone operating a quern, starve yourself until you are skin and bones, or turn to cannibalism and gnaw meat to the bone when the tuckahoe is gone, Alena Bruzas’ book To the Bone captures all of these idioms. Writing in the historical fiction genre, Bruzas retells the harrowing times of 1609-1610 at James Fort when the colonists find themselves suffering. To tell her tale, Bruzas features two teens: Jane Eddowes and Ellis Folk. Jane—full of spark, vitality, wit, and defiance—loves to draw and to pursue adventure. Ellis finds herself drawn to Jane. Because she lost her parents—her motherRead More →

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Ruby Hale, who avoids confrontation and spiders, hopes to be a travel influencer. Given that interest, she films, edits, and posts content to her YouTube Show, Ruby’s Hidden Gems. Seeing the feats other cultures have achieved and the architecture that they’ve built all speak to Ruby’s soul. So, when her French class schedules a trip to France, Ruby is beyond excited. She wants to soak in as much of the world as she can in order to earn her way to exploring more of it. Once Ruby reaches Paris, her adrenaline junkie friend Valerie Moreau encounters a young man named Julien who offers a tourRead More →

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Set in 1955 in Levittown, Pennsylvania, The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson explores a tumultuous period in our country’s history. During this time when school integration was new and Jim Crow Laws were still in effect, Levitt and Sons were mass-producing homes under the guise that they were helping to create affordable housing, especially for veterans. That housing, however, was for white families only, creating a deeply discriminatory practice. After serving as a soldier in World War II, Williams Greene is determined to provide access to the American Dream for his family. He is tired of the race riots in the big city,Read More →

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Stacey Lee’s Kill Her Twice is a fascinating historical fiction/murder mystery written for young adults. Based loosely on the character Anna May Wong, who is considered the first female Chinese American Hollywood movie star, the novel tells the story of the challenges faced by Chinese people living in Los Angeles, California, in 1932. Lee presents her clues by alternating between the perspectives of two teens: May Chow, 19, and her sister Gemma, 17, who sell flowers in City Market. The girls’ father, Ba, always told his daughters that “his three fierce clouds—Mei Wun, or ‘beautiful cloud,’ for May; Gam Wun, or ‘fresh cloud,’ for [Gemma];Read More →

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Set in the early 1800s, Sail Me Away Home by Ann Clare LeZotte tells the story of Mary Elizabeth Lambert. Mary, a deaf-mute living in Chilmark, Massachusetts, travels to Paris to return with ideas for starting a school in the Americas for the non-speaking deaf population. Like a bee pollinating flowers, Mary hopes to return with methods that will enable the languages of the deaf and the speaking to converge. Born with hereditary deafness, something that was not an anomaly in Martha’s Vineyard from 1740 to the late 1800s, Mary is determined “to treat all—no matter their dress, parentage, or how many acres their familyRead More →