Historical Fiction on-Going Class

History is important, awe-inspiring, troubling, exhilarating, messy, fascinating, and so much more. It's important for history to be read and discussed to better understand how we got to where we are today. This is an on-going class for those who want to learn about world history without having to listen to boring lectures! We will read about incredible events experienced by every day people. In this class, learners will read the assigned historical fiction book each week. We will discuss the story focusing on the event, character motivations, themes, point of view, and conflicts. Learners will be encouraged to express their opinions in class. Comparisons to other historical events will be encouraged. 

I have chosen books that offer an overview of events during different time periods indifferent parts of the world. The topic of most of the events is still relevant today and continue to influence the actions of governments and people.   

The atmosphere of this class will be relaxed and friendly. Differing opinions will be appreciated and valued. Every learner will have a voice in this class. I may also include a short game using Blooket or Kahoot. 
Although most of the books are set during an often painful and tragic historical event, the overriding themes are love and courage. It was through the strength and bravery of actual people living through the tragedies of long past events that allows us to read about those events today. 

I have copied the reviews directly from Goodreads or Kirkus, Common Sense media per Outschool reviews policy to better inform parents of the content for each book.

August 30
The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani  
Parents need to know that Veera Hiranandani's The Night Diary was named a 2019 Newbery Honor Book. It's the story of a Hindu family whose home, once in India, becomes part of Muslim Pakistan when British colonial rule ends and religious violence erupts between once-peaceful neighbors. It's loosely based on the experiences of author Hiranandani's family members in the 1940s. As 12-year-old narrator Nisha writes letters to her deceased mother in her diary, she describes the family's flight, hardships, dangers -- including murderous brawls and crazed knife-wielding men trying to kill children. This chapter of recent history will be a revelation to many Western readers. Its messages of love, family, friendship, kindness, and tolerance are still compelling and timely today. Common Sense Media Review
No Class September 6 (Labor Day)

September 13
Ground Zero by Alan Gratz (9/11)
Parents need to know that Ground Zero, by Alan Gratz (Refugee), is told in alternating chapters by 9-year-old American Brandon Cruz and 11-year-old Reshmina, who lives in rural Afghanistan. Brandon's story begins on the morning of September 11, 2000. He's come to work with his father, who's a kitchen manager on 107th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Reshmina begins her story on September 11, 2019, as her village becomes a deadly battleground between Taliban and American forces. For both, it's a day filled with violence. Brandon sees people burned alive, die in falling elevators, jump from high floors, and killed by the collapse of the Towers. In Afghanistan, Reshmina vividly describes the firefight between the Taliban and American soldiers and the destruction that comes to her village. But amid all this death and destruction there's also great courage and bravery, as strangers help one another escape the Towers and Reshmina's family risks their lives to give shelter to a wounded American soldier. Common Sense Media Review

September 20
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Parents need to know that this powerful and poignant tale set amid Oklahoma's "Dust Bowl" years is told entirely in free verse, which might pose a challenge for some readers. And although the writing is exceptional, the subject matter is relentlessly bleak; the book's joylessness might limit its appeal to young readers. Common Sense Media Review

September 27
Heart of a Samurai Margi Preus 
A 2011 Newbery Honor Book
In 1841, a Japanese fishing vessel sinks. Its crew is forced to swim to a small, unknown island, where they are rescued by a passing American ship. Japan’s borders remain closed to all Western nations, so the crew sets off to America, learning English on the way.

Manjiro, a fourteen-year-old boy, is curious and eager to learn everything he can about this new culture. Eventually the captain adopts Manjiro and takes him to his home in New England. The boy lives for some time in New England, and then heads to San Francisco to pan for gold. After many years, he makes it back to Japan, only to be imprisoned as an outsider. With his hard-won knowledge of the West, Manjiro is in a unique position to persuade the shogun to ease open the boundaries around Japan; he may even achieve his unlikely dream of becoming a samurai. Good Reads Review

October 4
Endangered by Eliot Schrefer 
Congolese-American Sophie makes a harrowing trek through a war-torn jungle to protect a young bonobo.

On her way to spend the summer at the bonobo sanctuary her mother runs, 14-year-old Sophie rescues a sickly baby bonobo from a trafficker. Though her Congolese mother is not pleased Sophie paid for the ape, she is proud that Sophie works to bond with Otto, the baby. A week before Sophie's to return home to her father in Miami, her mother must take advantage
of a charter flight to relocate some apes, and she leaves Sophie with Otto and the sanctuary workers. War breaks out, and after missing a U.N. flight out, Sophie must hide herself and Otto from violent militants and starving villagers. Unable to take Otto out of the country, she decides finding her mother hundreds of miles to the north is her only choice. Schrefer jumps from his usual teen suspense to craft this well-researched tale of jungle survival set during a fictional conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Realistic characters (ape and human) deal with disturbing situations described in graphic, but never gratuitous detail. The lessons Sophie learns about her childhood home, love and what it means to be endangered will resonate with readers. Kirkus review

October 11
The Clay Marble by Minfong Ho 
Dara's is one of the thousands of Cambodian families separated or destroyed by war, but there is hope as she and her brother and mother head for a refugee camp on the Thailand border. Once safely there, Dara makes friends with Jantu, who has an almost magical touch in creating toys from mud and scraps of fabric. When the camp is bombed, Jantu makes a magic marble out of clay that helps Dara track down her family and then return to the hospital for Jantu and her brother. Like clay dolls themselves, Ho's ( Rice Without Rain ) characters seem to walk through their parts--their emotional turmoil, rather than being revealed, is simply stated. Despite a potentially compelling story and setting, this novel never comes to life. Ages 10-up. Good Reads Review

October 18
The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti 
Spun off from interviews with survivors as well as published sources, Bartoletti crafts a novel closely based on the true story of Helmuth Hübener, a German teen who stood up to the Nazis and paid with his life. Written in present-tense flashbacks, the tale traces the development of Helmuth’s outlook from childhood delight in playing with toy soldiers within the safe confines of his closely knit Mormon family to ill-concealed fury as Hitler’s rise brings mounting violence against Jews, suppression of books and foreign news and a general climate of fear and mistrust. He resorts at last to anonymous pamphleteering, and his eventual capture brings imprisonment, beatings and a trial at which he manages to save two of his friends from death penalties. A long author’s note and a suite of photos cap this inspiring tale of conscience and courage. Kirkus review

October 25
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys 
This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction: Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, “Thieves and Prostitutes.” They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn’t know the breadth of Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they’ll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina’s sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family. Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. Kirkus review

November 1
When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park 

The author of three novels set in different periods of Korean history (A Single Shard, 2001, etc.) now turns to WWII for the story of a brother and sister and their lives with their parents and uncle. Telling their story in alternating voices, the two siblings offer complementary and sometimes different versions of events. Sun-hee, in the last year of elementary school in 1940, loves studying and is an obedient daughter while older brother Tae-yul loves speed and machines. Their uncle is a source of concern because he publishes an underground, anti-Japanese newspaper. The Japanese had conquered Korea in 1910 and as the war looms their demands on the Koreans intensify. Food grows scarcer and the Koreans, long forbidden to study their own culture and language, now must take Japanese names. Thus Sun-hee becomes Keoko. In one memorable passage, Sun-hee misunderstands an oblique warning from her Japanese friend and assumes that her uncle’s life is in danger. He flees, never to be seen again as the war and the post-war communist government in the north keep them apart. This beautifully written story captures these events through the eyes of a very likable young girl. In her voice, readers share the joys of playing cat’s cradle, eating popcorn, and tasting American chewing gum for the first time. Through Tae-yul’s they experience his gritty determination to join a kamikaze unit in order to protect his family from the suspicious Japanese. There is food for thought when Sun-hee’s father tells her that “they burn the paper—not the words” when referring to the Japanese soldiers who destroy her diary. There have been relatively few stories for young readers that are set in Asia during WWII. This powerful and riveting tale of one close-knit, proud Korean family movingly addresses life-and-death issues of courage and collaboration, injustice, and death-defying determination in the face of totalitarian oppression. Kirkus Review

No Class November 8

November 15
Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly Giff 
Newbery Medal–winner Giff (Lily's Crossing, 1997, etc.) weaves wisps of history into this wrenching tale of an Irish family sundered by the Great Potato Famine. 

The three Ryan sisters, their mother dead and their "da" away at sea, are struggling to make ends meet and care for old Granda and three-year-old Patrick, as their predatory English landlord waits for his rent on one side and America's golden promise glitters over the horizon on the other. Heralded by an ominous odor, blight sweeps through the potato fields, wiping out the crops overnight. Through young Nory's eyes, the aptly named Great Hunger is devastatingly real: not only do livestock and grain disappear, but so do shellfish and kelp, and finally even nettles and other weeds. Families are mercilessly driven from their homes, the dead are buried without ceremony, and little Patrick becomes ever thinner and more pitiable. Grasping at a sudden chance, big sister Maggie takes off for America, then Granda and teenage Celia set out for Galway, hoping to meet Da on the docks—leaving Nory to care for Patrick, and for old Anna Donnelly, a neighbor with a tragic past, as well. Nory makes the hardest sacrifice of all when an emigrating family invites her along and she sends Patrick in her place. So grim is the picture Giff draws that readers are likely to be startled by the sudden turnaround at the end, when news of Da's reappearance brings ship's passage for all and the prospect of a happy reunion in New York. Still, Nory's patient, stubborn endurance lights up this tale, and the promise of better times to come is well deserved.

November 22
Refugee by Alan Gratz (Germany, 1930; Cuba, 1994; Mahmoud, Syria, 2015)
In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees—Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo—eventually intertwine for maximum impact.

Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.

Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. Kirkus Review

No classes will be added to the schedule.

** All classes will begin on time as long as there is at least one learner in the classroom. If there are no students in the class 10 minutes after the class start time, the teacher will exit the classroom. This class cannot be taught with zero students. No recording will be available for classes with zero attendance.