Ten years after the end of the Second World War, the town of Rolfen, West Germany, looks just as peaceful and beautiful as ever, until young Peter Liebig discovers a secret about his past that leads him to question everything, including the town's calm facade and his own sense of comfort and belonging.
Thirteen-year-old Korinna must decide whether to report her parents to her Hitler youth group when she discovers that they are hiding Jews in a secret space behind Korinna's bedroom wall.
After the death of her father, King Henry VIII, in 1547, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth must endure the political intrigues and dangers of the reigns of her half-brother Edward and her half-sister Mary before finally becoming Queen of England eleven years later.
Having failed apprenticeship as a dye maker, Koji is captured and forced to train as a ninja, where he remains disloyal until he discovers samurai have burned his former village.
In 1897, fifteen-year-old Reuven Bloom, a Russian Jew, must set aside his dreams of playing the violin in order to save himself and his baby sister after the rest of their family is murdered.
A fictional diary of Princess Sophie, later named Catherine, from 1743 until 1745, when at age fifteen she is married to her second cousin Peter, Grand Duke of Russia, who will one day be Emperor..
During the Japanese occupation of parts of China, twelve-year-old Ye Xian is thrown out of her father's and stepmother's home, joins a martial arts group, and tries to help her aunt and the Americans in their struggle against the Japanese invaders. Includes historical notes.
During the German occupation of France in 1940, thirteen-year-old Lisette meets a ghost while living with her aunt who harbors Jewish and Gypsy children in the French countryside.
Peter, a Russian peasant boy, twelve years old in the year 1739 and full of dreams, chances to cross paths with the exiled Princess Elizabeth and comes to realize his fate is linked to hers.
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.
When Robin, the son of a nobleman, falls and loses the use of his legs, he is abandoned and left alone. A monk named Brother Luke rescues Robin and takes him to the hospice of St. Mark's were he is taught woodcarving and--much harder--patience and strength.
In a series of diary entries, Princess Elizabeth, the eleven-year-old daughter of King Henry VIII, celebrates holidays and birthdays, relives her mother's execution, revels in her studies, and agonizes over her father's health.
Despite the horrors of World War II, a French teenager pursues her dream of becoming an opera singer, which takes her to places where she gains information about what the Nazis are doing--information that the French Resistance needs.
To escape the Inquisition, Esther Marchadi, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a murdered Jewish rabbi, disguises herself as a boy and joins the crew of Christopher Columbus's "Santa Maria."
A fictionalized biography of the girl who was brought to America from Gambia as a slave and who later gained fame as an African American poet of great renown, from her time in Africa until she gained her freedom.
While attempting to solve the mystery of a stolen jewel, Seikei, a merchant's son who longs to be a samurai, joins a group of kabuki actors in eighteenth-century Japan.
In 1934, thirteen-year-old Marya and her younger brother, Georgi, set out alone on a long and arduous journey into Siberia to find their mother after she and their father are exiled for opposing Stalin.
During the final days of the Japanese occupation of China, Shao-shao celebrates his tenth birthday, observes traditional holidays with his family, and befriends the daughter of a traitor.
When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a mysterious toyseller and his goddaughter, his undercover life and his biggest secret are jeopardized.
While waiting anxiously for others to choose a husband for her, Isabella, the future Queen of Spain, keeps a diary account of her life as a member of the royal family.
In 1592, twelve-year-old Isabel dreams of adventure and finds it, not only on her journey from her London home to her aunt's manor house in Northamptonshire, but also through the healing arts her aunt teaches her.
In fifteenth-century Africa, Kai and her beautiful but lazy older sister Jamila undertake a perilous four-day journey to another Yoruba village, seeking help for their starving tribe after the blight of the yam crop.
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.
In 1788, eleven-year-old Isabelle, living with her lacemaker grandmother and mother near the palace of Versailles, becomes close friends with Marie Antoinette's daughter, Princess Therese, and finds their relationship complicated not only by their different social class but by the growing political unrest and resentment of the French people.
In 531 A.D., a fifteen-year-old princess of the Hsien tribe in southern China keeps a diary which describes her role as liaison between her own people and the local Chinese colonists, in times of both peace and war.
Left an orphan after the influenza epidemic in British East Africa in 1918, thirteen-year-old Rachel is tricked into assuming a deceased neighbor's identity to travel to England, where her only dream is to return to Africa and rebuild her parents' mission hospital.
Living as refugees in Japan in 1947 while trying to locate their missing father, thirteen-year-old Yoko and her older brother and sister must endure a bad fire, injury, and false charges of arson, theft, and murder.
In 11th century Troyes, France, Elvina, the unusual granddaughter of renowned Jewish rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, who prefers studying and writing to activities considered respectable for girls, takes a great risk by helping a young boy who has run away from a group of Christian Crusaders.
Still sad and frightened after living in Poland through World War I and the Russian Revolution, twelve-year-old Devorah Lehrman, her younger sister, and other Jewish orphans travel with Isaac Ochberg to South Africa and make a new start.
Aware of her older sister's powers of sorcery, which have been used to help secure the Scottish throne for Robert de Brus, Meg realizes she must try to protect the young Norwegian princess who has been chosen as rightful heir.
When their father is sent away to prison, three London children move to the country where they keep busy preventing accidents on the nearby railway, making many new friends, and generally learning a good deal about themselves.
In 1542, nine-year-old Lady Elizabeth lives on an estate near London, striving to get back into the good graces of her father, King Henry VIII, and as the years pass she faces his death and those of other close relatives until she finds herself next in line to ascend the throne of England in 1558.
Because he knows that the man accused of robbery is innocent, an eleven-year-old orphan struggles to find courage to reveal the truth to his uncle in their small German village in 1867.
After being kidnapped and brought to the emperor's palace in Gondar, Ethiopia, twelve-year-old Saba discovers that she and her brother are part of the emperor's desperate attempt to consolidate political power in the mid-1840's.
In turbulent sixteenth-century Japan, orphaned Taro is taken in by a general serving the great warlord Takeda Shingen and grows up to become a samurai fighting for the enemies of his dead family.
A young orphan boy is ordered by his master to infiltrate Shakespeare's acting troupe in order to steal the script of "Hamlet," but he discovers instead the meaning of friendship and loyalty.
In plague-ridden 1602 England, a fifteen-year-old orphan boy, who has become an apprentice actor, goes on the road with Shakespeare's troupe, and finds out more about his parents along the way.
In France during World War I, four French children learn about honesty, loyalty, and courage from an English army deserter who tells them a series of stories related to his small, silver donkey charm.
Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself.
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.
In a series of messages placed in her grandmother's ancestral jar, a seventh century princess and future ruler of the Korean kingdom of Silla vents her frustration at not being permitted to study astronomy because she is a girl.
Called boyish by her new family for being able to read and write, twelve-year-old orphaned Spring Pearl's "odd ways" help save the family during the 1857 Opim War in Canton, China.
After twelve-year-old Annika, a foundling living in late nineteenth-century Vienna, inherits a trunk of costume jewelry, a woman claiming to be her aristocratic mother arrives and takes her to live in a strangely decrepit mansion in Germany.
Juliana, an eleven-year-old Saxon girl, loses her home and family when the Normans conquer England in 1066 and seeks to order her life by becoming involved in the creation of the Bayeux tapestry.
In this autobiographical novel set in Nazi-occupied France, Renée, a young Jewish girl, and her family flee their home in Alsace and live a precarious existence in Paris until Renée and her sister escape to the shelter of a convent in Normandy.
When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849 London, fourteen-year-old John Huffman must take on unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant relative for help to determining why people are spying on him and his family.
Follows the ordeal of fourteen-year-old twins Astra and Hugo Petersons, as they and their family flee their native Latvia before the advancing Russian armies in late 1944 and find themselves homeless refugees in a war-torn Germany.
In 1829, nine-year-old Victoria begins a journal chronicling her life as an English princess. Includes information on the reign, marriage, and family life of Queen Victoria and English civilization during that period.
Alternating chapters follow the mysterious connection between a homesick English girl living in present-day America and an eleven-year-old boy serving in the British Royal Navy in 1803, aboard the H.M.S. Victory, commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson.
After his mother dies, Damon, a young medical student living in Alexandria, Egypt, in 45 B.C., makes a perilous journey to Spain to locate his father who is serving in the Roman army led by Julius Caesar.
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
In 1140, with England divided between the supporters of King Stephen and those of the Empress Matilda, twelve-year-old Will Belet, small for his age but longing to be a knight, comes to his Uncle's castle to be a page and soon finds himself involved in dangerous intrigues and adventures.
