Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba
10 best books like Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Margarita Engle): Lizzie and the Lost Baby, Caminar, The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, The Other Half of Life: A Novel Based on the True Story of the MS St. Louis, Lifeboat 12, All the Broken Pieces, Worlds Afire, Aleutian Sparrow, The Braid, Almost Forever
| Author | Cheryl Blackford |
| ISBN | 0544570995 |
Cheryl Blackford's debut novel is set in England during World War II and told from the dual perspectives of ten-year-old Lizzie, a homesick girl evacuated from bomb-blitzed Hull to the remote Yorkshire valley, and Elijah, a local gypsy boy. When Lizzie discovers an abandoned baby, her dangerous friendship...
| Author | Skila Brown |
| ISBN | 0763665169 |
Set in 1981 Guatemala, a lyrical debut novel tells the powerful tale of a boy who must decide what it means to be a man during a time of war.
Carlos knows that when the soldiers arrive with warnings about the Communist rebels, it is time to be a man and defend the village, keep everyone safe. But Mama...
The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust
| Author | Karen Gray Ruelle |
| ISBN | 0823421597 |
When the Nazis occupied Paris, no Jew was safe from arrest and deportation.
Few Parisians were willing to risk their own lives to help. Yet during that perilous time, many Jews found refuge in an unlikely place--the sprawling complex of the Grand Mosque of Paris. Not just a place of worship but...
| Author | Kim Ablon Whitney |
| ISBN | 0375852190 |
A heartbreaking novel based on the true story of a World War II voyage.
In May of 1939, the SS St. Francis sets sail from Germany, carrying German Jews and other refugees away from Hitler’s regime. The passengers believe they are bound for freedom in Cuba and eventually the United States, but...
In the tradition of The War That Saved My Life and Stella By Starlight, this poignant novel in verse based on true events tells the story of a boy’s harrowing experience on a lifeboat after surviving a torpedo attack during World War II.
With Nazis bombing London every night, it’s time for...
| Author | Ann E. Burg |
| ISBN | 0545080924 |
A remarkable literary debut by a stunning new voice in children's fiction.
Two years after being airlifted out of war-torn Vietnam, Matt Pin is haunted: by bombs that fell like dead crows, by the family -- and the terrible secret -- he left behind. Now, inside a caring adoptive home in the United States,...
| Author | Paul B. Janeczko |
| ISBN | 0763622354 |
In his first full-length poetic work, celebrated poetry anthologist Paul B. Janeczko creates a stirring fictional account of the 1944 Hartford circus fire.
One summer afternoon in 1944, hundreds of circus lovers crowded under the big top in Hartford, Connecticut, breathlessly waiting...
| Author | Karen Hesse |
| ISBN | 1416903275 |
In June 1942, seven months after attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy invaded Alaska's Aleutian Islands. For nine thousand years the Aleut people had lived and thrived on these treeless, windswept lands. Within days of the first attack, the entire native population living west of Unimak Island...
| Author | Helen Frost |
| ISBN | 0374309620 |
Two sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, tell their separate yet tightly interwoven stories in alternating narrative poems. Each sister - Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother...
| Author | Maria Testa |
| ISBN | 0763633666 |
"Rapt readers don’t need to know anything about Vietnam to understand love, loss, fear, and waiting. A tour de force." — KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
When the six-year-old narrator of this lyric novel watches her father march off to serve a year in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, a year...
| Author | Carole Boston Weatherford |
| ISBN | 1590784405 |
A poetic tribute to the victims of the racially motivated church bombing that served as a seminal event in the struggle for civil rights. In 1963, the eyes of the world were on Birmingham, Alabama, a flashpoint for the civil rights movement. Birmingham was one of the most segregated cities in the United...
| Author | Susan Taylor Brown |
| ISBN | 1582461805 |
When her mom runs away from home, Rachel is left behind with her emotionally distant father and many questions she cannot answer. Over time, she learns the truth about her mom. But it's only when she learns the truth about her dad, the rock- immoveable and always there for her to lean on-that Rachel can...
| Author | Mel Glenn |
| ISBN | 0060004819 |
Everyone has an image of Laura Li, the most popular girl in school: “stone hearted,” “warmhearted,” “conceited deceiver,” “humble achiever,” “a virgin,” “the hottest girl in the world.”
Award-winning poet Mel Glenn weaves a brilliant web of authentic voices...
Sometime around 1815, an enslaved young man named Dave was brought to Edgefield, South Carolina, the center of a pottery-producing area known for the alkaline glazes used on the stoneware. Dave was taught how to turn pots and jars on a pottery wheel by one of his first owners. As Dave's talent flourished,...
| Author | Jorge Argueta |
| ISBN | 1554988497 |
Why are young people leaving their country to walk to the United States to seek a new, safe home? Over 100,000 such children have left Central America. This book of poetry helps us to understand why and what it is like to be them.
This powerful book by award-winning Salvadoran poet Jorge Argueta...
| Author | Jen Bryant |
| ISBN | 0375827528 |
Imagine you are Bruno Richard Hauptmann, accused of murdering the son of the most famous man in America.
In a compelling, immediate voice, 12-year-old Katie Leigh Flynn takes us inside the courtroom of the most widely publicized criminal case of the 20th century: the kidnapping and murder...
| Author | Fran Cannon Slayton |
| ISBN | 0399251898 |
Jimmy lives in Rowlesburg, West Virginia, during the 1940s. He does all the things boys do in the small mountain town: plays a mean game of football, pulls the unforgettable Halloween prank with his friends in ?the Platoon,? and promises to head off into the woods on the first day of hunting season? no...
| Author | Stephanie Hemphill |
| ISBN | 0786837454 |
Sarah used to be the good girl. The one who always had her hand raised in class, always obeyed her parents.
Until she met Robin. Once Robin comes into the picture, Sarah's life changes. Her closet begins to fill with black clothes. Good grades become something to be studiously avoided. And maintaining...
| Author | Eileen Spinelli |
| ISBN | 0375858709 |
DELICIOUS PANCAKES!!
FREE!!
ALL YOU CAN EAT!!
COME TO OUR
NEW GRAND OPENING!
The grand opening of the Dancing Pancake isn't the only new thing in Bindi's life: new friends, a new apartment, maybe even a cute new crush? But there are other changes, like her dad's move to a new...
For Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris, nowhere is safe. So when Odette Meyer’s father is sent to a Nazi work camp, Odette’s mother takes desperate measures to protect her, sending Odette deep into the French countryside. There, Odette pretends to be a peasant girl, even posing as a Christian–and attending...
One of 12 siblings growing up in depression-era Baltimore, Edith isn't quite sure of who she is. Between working at her father’s diner, taking care of her younger siblings, and living in the shadow of her more mature sisters, Edith feels lost in a sea of siblings. When a kind teacher encourages...
| Author | Peter Lane Taylor |
| ISBN | 1580132618 |
This was one of the most fascinating Holocaust survival stories I’ve ever read. Can you imagine living in a series of caves deep underground for 344 days, without once seeing the sun? That is what a group of Jewish villagers, all related by blood or marriage, did to escape from the Nazis during World...
| Author | Debbie Levy |
| ISBN | 1423129016 |
This book tells the true story of what happened to a 12-year-old girl named Jutta (Debbie Levy’s mother) in 1938. Actual entries in a posiealbum (autograph book) serve as stepping stones in a crucial year in history, when people of Jewish ancestry in Germany and Austria were systematically stripped...
