Anderson, M.T. – The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: The Pox Party (351 pages) Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War. (N)
Draper, Sharon M. – Copper Sun (302 pages) Two fifteen-year-old girls—one a slave and the other an indentured servant—escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves. (LC)
Lester, Julius – Time’s Memory (230 pages) On a slave ship to America, a young African woman discovers she is pregnant. But this is no ordinary child—once in America, Amina realizes she has given birth to Ekundayo, the master of life and death. Can a spirit child bring peace to the brutality of a slave’s existence? (K)
Mosley, Walter – 47 (232 pages) Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom. (N)
Moss, Thylias – Slave Moth (152 pages) Varl, a slave girl who can read and write, plots her escape from the plantation she’s always known as home. A novel told in verse. (K)
Pate, Alexs D. – Amistad (316 pages) A fictionalized account of the 1839 mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad includes John Quincy Adams' role in defending its instigator before the Supreme Court. (N)
Rinaldi, Ann - Mine Eyes Have Seen (273 pages) In the summer of 1859, fifteen-year-old Annie travels to the Maryland farm where her father, John Brown, is secretly assembling his provisional army prior to their raid on the United States arsenal at nearby Harpers Ferry. (N)
Siegelson, Kim L. – Trembling Earth (152 pages) In 1864, two boys, one a slave running toward freedom and one hoping to collect the reward for capturing him, make their way through Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, relying on knowledge the white boy's father, disabled by the war, had passed on to him in happier times. (N)
Civil War
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
(138 pages) Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, struggles with his conflicting emotions about violence, death, and the nature of bravery in this ironic, skeptical account of the Civil War. (N)
Elliot, Laura Malone – Annie, Between the States
(488 pages) Instead of spending her teen years at parties and balls, Annie, an idealistic, poetry-loving patriot, finds herself nursing soldiers, hiding valuables, and running the household as the Civil War rages around her family's Virginia home. (N)
Ernst, Kathleen – Heartsof Stone
(248 pages) Orphaned when her father dies fighting for the Union and her mother expires from exhaustion, and also estranged from their Confederate neighbors, fourteen-year-old Hannah struggles to find a way for her family to survive during the Civil War in Tennessee. (N)
Holland, Isabelle – Behind the Lines
(194 pages) During the New York Draft Riot of 1863, a young Irish Catholic girl helps an African American make a daring escape from an angry mob. (N)
Myers, Anna – Assassin
(212 pages) – In alternating passages, a young White House seamstress named Bella and the actor John Wilkes Booth describe the events that lead to the latter's assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (N)
Peck, Richard – A River Between Us
(164 pages) During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois. (N)
Rinaldi, Ann –
An Acquaintance with Darkness
(294 pages) When her mother dies and her best friend's family is implicated in the assassination of President Lincoln, fourteen-year-old Emily Pigbush must go live with an uncle she suspects of being involved in stealing bodies for medical research. (N)
Girl in Blue (310 pages) To escape an abusive father and an arranged marriage, fourteen-year-old Sarah, dressed as a boy, leaves her Michigan home to enlist in the Union Army, and becomes a soldier on the battlefields of Virginia as well as a Union spy working in the house of Confederate sympathizer Rose O'Neal Greenhow in Washington, D.C. (N)
In My Father’s House
(323 pages) An overview of the Civil War provides the setting for the evolution of a young girl's relationship with her stepfather. (N)
The Last Silk Dress
(350 pages) During the Civil War, Susan finds a way to help the Confederate Army and uncovers a series of mysterious family secrets. (N)
Sarah’s Ground
(178 pages) In 1861, eighteen-year-old Sarah Tracy, from New York state, comes to work at Mount Vernon, the historic Virginia home of George Washington, where she tries to protect the safety and neutrality of the site during the Civil War, and where she encounters her future husband, Upton Herbert. Includes historical notes. (N)
