In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note.

Savannah Riddle feels suffocated by her life as the daughter of an upper class African American family in Washington, D.C., until she meets a working-class girl named Nell who introduces her to the suffragette and socialist movements and to her politically active cousin Lloyd. 1919. As a daughter of an upper class African American family in Washington D.C., Savannah is lucky, but feels suffocated by the structure of society. Lloyd, a young West Indian...

On her father's farm in Scotland in 1945, Lorna Anderson's life consists of endless chores, rationing, knitting Red Cross scarves, and praying for an Allied victory. So when Paul Vogel, a German prisoner of war, is assigned as the new farmhand, Laura is appalled. How can she possibly work alongside the enemy when her own brothers are risking their lives for their country? But as Lorna reluctantly spends time with Paul, she feels herself changing....

Lillia, her younger sister Naomi, , and their father fled Warsaw in 1940. Shanghai was one of the few places that would accept Jews without visas. She worries about how their mother, Alenka, would find them. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when they were circus performers. She makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her...

In 1928 Chicago, eighteen-year-old Ruby, daughter of the state attorney, uses her ability to read minds as a vigilante to hunt out murderers and kill them even if they have not yet committed the crime; Guy works in the morgue, and wants to understand the human body, because maybe then he will learn how it is that he is able to shapeshift into other people--something Ruby plans to use because someone is out to get her father and she is pretty sure...

In 1970, fourteen-year-old Shoshanna, six-year-old Mara, and their mother escape from Sweet Earth Farm, a declining commune run by their tyrranical and abusive father, but after finding peace and stability at Avery Elliot's farm, their mother's crippling depression returns.

In early 1940s Los Angeles, Mexican Americans Marisela and Lorena work in canneries all day then jitterbug with sailors all night with their zoot suit wearing younger brother, Ray, as escort until the night racial violence leads to murder. Includes historical note.

In this powerful book we enter the world of  Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives  in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom,  and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the  astonishing truth about "packingtown," the  busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where  new world visions perish in a jungle of human  suffering. Upton Sinclair,...

"As the most destructive war in history ravaged Europe, many of the world's most cherished cultural objects were in harm's way. The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History recounts the astonishing true story of eleven men and one woman who risked their lives amidst the bloodshed of World War II to preserve churches, libraries, monuments, and works of art that for centuries defined the heritage of Western civilization. As the war raged, these American and...

Sixteen-year-old Catholic Stefania Podgórska has worked in the Diamant family's grocery store for four years, even falling in love with one of their sons, Izio; but when the Nazis came to Przemsyl, Poland, the Jewish Diamants are forced into the ghetto (and worse) and only Izio's brother Max manages to escape, and Stefania embarks on a dangerous course--protecting thirteen Jews in her attic, caring for her younger sister, Helena, and keeping everything...