| CHAINS by Laurie Halse Anderson.
After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War. |
 | GERONIMO by Joseph Bruchac.
While imprisoned in an Oklahoma jail, the Native American hero Geronimo meets a young Apache man who tells him of his own struggles for freedom, in a tale about Geronimo's incredible life and his last memorable days on Earth. |
 | SACAJAWEA by Joseph Bruchac.
Sacajawea, a Shoshoni Indian interpreter, peacemaker, and guide, and William Clark alternate in describing their experiences on the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Northwest. |
 | THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET by Sandra Cisneros.
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness. |
 | YEAR OF IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES by Sook Nyul Choi.
An unforgettable portrait of one community’s struggle under Japanese occupation. This book portrays the incredible courage of a young girl handling crisis after crisis. |
 | ELIJAH OF BUXTON by Christopher Paul Curtis
In 1859, eleven-year-old Elijah Freeman, the first free-born child in Buxton, Canada, which is a haven for slaves fleeing the American South, uses his wits and skills to try to bring to justice the lying preacher who has stolen money that was to be used to buy a family's freedom. |
 | COPPER SUN by Sharon Draper
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. |
 | THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE by Louise Erdrich
Omakayas, a seven-year-old Native American girl of the Ojibwa tribe, lives through the joys of summer and the perils of winter on an island in Lake Superior in 1847. |
 | THE LIBERATION OF GABRIEL KING by K.L. Going
In Georgia during the summer of 1976, Gabriel, a white boy who is being bullied, and Frita, an African American girl who is facing prejudice, decide to overcome their many fears together as they enter fifth grade. |
 | BETWEEN US BAXTERS by Bethany Hegedus
The friendship between two girls-one white, one black-reveals a 1950s Southern town torn apart by racism in the Jim Crow South. |
 | THE DARKEST CORNER by Mildred Barger Herschler.
Her friendship with the black woman who works for her family and with two black neighbors in the small Mississippi town where she grows up in the 1950s and 1960s brings Teddy into conflict with her racist father, a member of the local Ku Klux Klan. |
 | KIRA-KIRA by Cynthia Kadohata.
Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill. |
 | WEEDFLOWER by Cynthia Kadohata.
After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop. |
 | STONES OF MOURNING CREEK by Diane Les Bequets
In Alabama in the 1960s, fourteen-year-old Francie develops a controversial and dangerous friendship with a "colored girl" her own age. |
 | THE ROCK AND THE RIVER by Kekla Magoon
For thirteen-year-old Sam it's not easy being the son of known civil rights activist Roland Childs. Especially when his older brother (and best friend), Stick, begins to drift away from him for no apparent reason. And then it happens: Sam finds something that changes everything forever. |
 | THE FOLD by An Na
Korean American high school student Joyce Kim feels like a nonentity compared to her beautiful older sister, and when her aunt offers to pay for plastic surgery on her eyes, she jumps at the chance, thinking it will change her life for the better. |
 | A STEP FROM HEAVEN by An Na.
A young Korean girl and her family find it difficult to learn English and adjust to life in America. |
 | THE COLOR OF FIRE by Ann Rinaldi
In 1741, while America is at war with Catholic Spain, Phoebe must save her friend Cuffee from execution when the whites in New York City accuse the black slaves of planning a revolt, which erupts in violence and the death of many innocent people. |
 | THE LETTER WRITER by Ann Rinaldi
A young girl who serves as letter writer for her blind stepmother is haunted by her unwitting role in Nat Turner's Rebellion, one of the bloodiest slave uprisings in the history of America. |
 | ESPERANZA RISING by Pam Munoz Ryan.
Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression. |
 | UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN by Graham Salisbury.
Tomikazu Nakaji's biggest concerns are baseball, homework, and a local bully, until life with his Japanese family in Hawaii changes drastically after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. |
 | IF I HAD JUST TWO WINGS by Virginia Frances Schwartz
Phoebe's thirteen years as an African American slave have not been easy, but then she hears of a way that she can escape to Canada and lead the life she has always imagined. |
 | DANGEROUS SKIES by Suzanne Fisher Staples
Hypocrisy and prejudice twist events in such a way as to implicate two children, one from a prominent white family and the other an Afro-American, in a murder. |
 | JOURNEY TO TOPAZ and JOURNEY HOME
by Yoshiko Uchida.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, an eleven-year-old Japanese-American girl and her family are forced to go to an aliens camp in Utah. |
 | HURRICANE SONG by Paul Volponi
High school sophomore Miles Shaw goes to live with his father, a jazz musician, in New Orleans, and together they survive the horrors of Hurricane Katrina in the Superdome, learning about each other and growing closer through their painful experiences. |
 | THE RED ROSE BOX by Brenda Woods.
In 1953, Leah Hopper dreams of leaving the poverty and segregation of her home in Sulphur, Louisiana, and when Aunt Olivia sends train tickets to Los Angeles as part of her tenth birthday present, Leah and her sister Ruth get a first taste of freedom. |
 | FEATHERS by Jacqueline Woodson.
When a new, white student nicknamed "The Jesus Boy" joins her sixth grade class in the winter of 1971, Frannie's growing friendship with him makes her start to see some things in a new light. |
 | BAT 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff
In small town, post-World War Oregon, twenty-one 6th grade girls recount the story of an annual softball game, during which one girl's bigotry comes to the surface. |