7 Captivating YA Historical Fiction Picks for Your First Chapter Friday

African Town is, in many ways, a love letter to the formerly enslaved men and women who founded Africatown in Mobile, Alabama, in the years following the Civil War. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect in the United States in 1808, but the last known illegal shipment of slaves arrived in 1860, when 110 (or 108, depending on the source) West Africans were kidnapped, sold, and transported against their will on the Clotilda. These men, women, and children formed a strong community, and during Reconstruction, they purchased the land that became Africatown. Africatown still has 2,000 residents, 100 of whom are believed to be descendants of the enslaved people transported on the Clotilda.

Waters and Latham take this well-documented story and transform it into a gorgeous novel in verse that introduces us to our characters in West Africa, travels with them across the Atlantic, and stays with them through the end of the 1800s. Waters and Latham weave together multiple perspectives, including both enslaved people and the white men who illegally purchased and transported them, and they intentionally write each character’s perspective with its own unique meter and form (they explain their choices in the material at the end of the novel).

The novel provides us with insight into the horrors of chattel slavery, particularly the transatlantic slave trade, but the authors’ primary goal is to highlight the hope and accomplishments of the men, women, and children who survived the experience and eventually built a life for themselves in a country that did everything possible to prevent them from doing so, even after slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment and the end of the Civil War. We’re glad to have heard their stories.

Karl Stern is ethnically Jewish, but he and his family don’t practice the religion. This, however, doesn’t matter to his classmates in 1930s Berlin, members of the Hitler Youth who bully him for his ethnicity. Karl longs to prove his worth, and when famous boxer and family friend Max Schmeling offers to give him boxing lessons, to change people’s impression of Jews by becoming an elite boxer.

As Karl trains, developing his skill alongside Max, restrictions tighten on the Jews of Berlin, though the Jewish community continues to believe that “This will pass.” By 1938, when the horrible events of Kristallnacht take place, it’s too late for the families in Karl’s neighborhood to escape, and Karl must take on the role of family protector while wondering if he can trust Max, who is spending more and more time with Nazi elites.

Loosely based on the real Max Schmeling, the novel tells a compelling story that will appeal to students who love history, sports, and stories about teenagers developing bravery, courage, and maturity.

Another Holocaust novel, The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl growing up just outside of Munich, Germany. She develops a fascination with books when she sees one fall out of a gravedigger’s pocket (a gravedigger burying her younger brother, who died on their trip to Munich), which she steals and keeps, despite not knowing how to read.

Liesel’s foster father, Hans, teaches her to read, and her fascination with books and words grows as she continues to steal books and eventually begins writing her own stories. When Hans agrees to hide a young Jewish man in the basement of their home, life becomes more dangerous for the entire family.

Narrated by Death, the novel tells a compelling story of World War II from an unusual perspective, and it gives cause for readers to reflect on topics like courage, compassion, and the power of language.

While not exactly YA historical fiction (even if parts of it read that way), Freedland’s nonfiction biography of Rudolf Vrba will fascinate your more advanced readers and history lovers, and it’s a great resource for you if you teach Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Vrba, formerly Walter Rosenberg, was born in Slovakia and sent to a labor camp in Poland. After two escape attempts, the teenaged Walter was sent to Auschwitz, where he was a prisoner from 1942–44. The first half of the book describes his experiences in the concentration camp, particularly his realization that the camp was essentially a mass-murder factory. Rosenberg was determined to commit every detail, every count of murdered Jews to memory so that he could escape and warn his fellow Jews.

Vrba and another prisoner, Fred Wetzler (renamed Jozev Lanik, though the men’s report is later called the Vrba-Wetzler report), escaped from Auschwitz, two of only a very few men who did so. The book describes their escape from the camp itself as well as their treacherous journey to cross the border from Poland back into Slovakia; it is in the escape process that Rosenberg becomes Vrba.

The last third of the book is fascinating and heartbreaking in an entirely different way, as it describes Vrba’s and Fred’s attempts to warn Hungarian Jews of their imminent deportation to Auschwitz, where most of them will face certain death. It’s a history we were unfamiliar with, and it’s disheartening to realize how much of the world had some awareness of what was happening to the Jews and yet did nothing to intervene, due to military goals, skepticism, and prejudice. It’s also disheartening to realize the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism around the globe that bleeds into modern times.

If you’ve read or teach Night, there are fascinating parallels between Vrba’s efforts to warn the world about the horrors of Auschwitz and Moishe the Beadle’s ineffective attempts to warn the Jews of Sighet, and Freedland grapples with the reasons so few people were able (or willing) to believe what was happening.

The text is hard to read in parts, and its length (especially post-war when Vrba is angry and bitter) will make it less appealing to struggling readers, but it’s an important book, telling a little-known but important part of history, and we think your older students will find it a powerful read.

Hanneke is a young Dutch girl grieving the death of her boyfriend Bas two years before the novel begins. She works for a local undertaker and helps him smuggle goods in and out of Amsterdam during its German occupation. Hanneke is weighed down by her boyfriend’s death, and she is also mourning the loss of her friendship to Elsbeth, who has married a member of the Gestapo.

On one of her smuggling errands, an elderly woman pleads for Hanneke’s help in locating Mirjam, a Jewish teenager the woman had been hiding in a secret compartment behind her pantry.

As Hanneke searches for Mirjam, she sees more and more she has in common with the young woman. Her investigation leads her to a resistance group that, like the real Amsterdam Student Group during the 1940s, places Jewish children with Amsterdam families to keep them safe. As Hanneke learns more about Mirjam and the atrocities the Nazis are committing, she feels increasingly motivated to take action, and we see her mature and heal from her grief while we wait in suspense to find out what has happened to Mirjam.

Lo tells us in her author’s note that she was inspired to write after reading a couple books that “gave [her] glimpses into Asian American history that has too often fallen through the cracks, and [she] wondered what life might have been like for a queer Asian American girl who dreamed of rocket ships, growing up in the 1950s” (397). Not only does this perfectly describe her novel, but it highlights why a novel like this is important: it illustrates a corner of history that we knew almost nothing about, and, as always in good literature, offers us and our students opportunities to develop empathy.

Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, Lily Hu is fascinated by articles she finds in magazines about space. Her aunt works at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she longs to one day be a scientist herself, a desire uncommon for girls in America at that time. Her community also faces pressure from the Red Scare paranoia that blankets the country, particularly following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong in 1949.

When Lily discovers a picture of Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator at the Telegraph Club, she can’t stop thinking about it, and after befriending Kathleen Miller, a classmate who shares her interest in airplanes and knows about the Telegraph Club, she goes to visit, finding herself drawn into San Francisco’s lesbian scene and understanding longings she has never quite known what to do with. (Note: A couple brief intimate moments may make this more appropriate for older readers.)

We were fascinated by this little-known bit of history, and our hearts ached for Lily (and the many real women who shared her experiences) as she moved toward inevitable conflict with her traditional friends and family.

Kate’s son introduced us to Auxier’s beautiful novel when he read it for Battle of the Books. While intended for younger readers, we always insist that a good book is a good book, and we thoroughly enjoyed reading about 11-year-old Nan Sparrow, a chimney sweep in Victorian England.

Orphaned, Nan grew up under the protection of the Sweep, who taught her everything she knows about surviving her difficult and dangerous job, but he has been gone for five years, and she now works for the unsavory Wilkie Crudd.

After Nan nearly dies in a chimney fire, she wakes up next to a golem, whom she names Charlie, made from a long-burning piece of soot the Sweep left her. The friendship between Nan and Charlie is rich and sweet, even though they must live in hiding to avoid Crudd. Nan befriends Esther Bloom, a teacher who reads both English and Hebrew with her, and Nan becomes angry at the romanticized image of the chimney sweep portrayed in William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” (until she reads its companion in The Songs of Experience).

Nan’s friendships with Miss Bloom and Toby, a local Jewish boy, introduce her to Jewish history and the racism Jews face in Victorian England, and as she matures throughout the novel, Nan becomes determined to stand up against the unfair child labor practices that characterize her world. Ultimately, Nan’s story is one of hope as she does what she can to help those around her and finds joy in the friendships in her life, no longer alone after the Sweep’s death.