Great Books for Teens

After suffering a concussion while on a class trip to a Holocaust exhibit, Nicole finds herself living the life of a Jewish teenager in Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Seventh-grader Martin Conway believes that his life is monotonous and dull until the night the antique radio he uses as a night-light transports him to the bombing of London in 1940.

When his owner is killed during the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940, a little performing dog changes the lives of successive caretakers as he journeys through the war-ravaged countryside looking for a permanent home.

While seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers' attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

Eighteen-year-old Francis Cassavant has returned from World War II an unwilling hero. Although he can still see and hear, a grenade has blown away his nose, his ears, his teeth, and his cheeks, leaving him faceless. Hiding his ghastly wounds with bandages and a white silk scarf, Francis welcomes the anonymity his mutilation brings him, for he has returned to his hometown with a secret mission--a plot for revenge that he values more than his own life.

After his plane is shot down by Hitler's Luftwaffe, nineteen-year-old Henry Forester of Richmond, Virginia, strives to walk across occupied France, with the help of the French Resistance, in hopes of rejoining his unit.

A struggling American ventriloquist in post-World War II Europe is possessed by the mischievous spirit of a young Jewish boy killed in the Holocaust.

Thirteen-year-old Halina Rudowski narrowly escapes the Polish ghetto and flees to the forest, where she is taken in by an encampment of Jews trying to survive World War II.

When her father gets a job in the B-24 bomber-building factory, eleven-year-old Meggie learns about different kinds of bravery from all of the people around her.

In 1942, fourteen-year-old Jill goes to stay with her grandmother on the coast of Maine, where she is introduced to the often gossipy nature of small-town life, and discovers that the war is closer than she thought.

An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the population from the invading Japanese. 

When teenager Ann Fay takes over as "man of the house" for her absent soldier father, she struggles to keep the family and herself together in the face of personal tragedy and the 1940s polio epidemic in North Carolina.

Two boys, one German and one American, are eager to join their respective armies during World War II, and their paths cross at the Battle of the Bulge.

In an attempt to save his daughter's life, Eva's father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia.

Gabi and Max sneak out at night and become scouts for the nearby anti-Nazi soldiers.

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.

Two girls spend a year in Los Alamos, New Mexico as their parents work on the secret gadget that will end World War II.

After German forces occupy Denmark during World War II, fifteen-year-old Julie Weinstein and fifteen-year-old Niels Nelson and their friends and families try to cope with their daily lives, finding various ways to resist the Nazis and, ultimately, to survive.

When the Nazi party takes control of Germany, thirteen-year-old Paula, who is deaf, finds her world-as-she-knows-it turned upside down, as she is taken into hiding to protect her from the new law nicknamed T4.

When German soldiers arrive in Poland during World War II, a young Jewish girl must decide whether or not to conceal her identity and work for a Nazi in Germany in order to survive.

While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7, 1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell.

A seventeen-year-old soldier from central Virginia records his experiences in a journal as his regiment takes part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and subsequent battles to liberate France.

When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Joe Hamada and his family face growing prejudice, eventually being torn away from their home and sent to a relocation camp in California, even as his older brother joins the United States Army to fight in the war.

Following orders from the United States Army, several young Japanese American men train K-9 units to hunt Asians during World War II.

During World War II, a light-skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

A curious and kind orphan paints a vivid picture of the streets of the Nazi-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

While eleven-year-old Hugh, his family, and his cousin Tom are spending the summer of 1943 on the South Carolina shore to escape the polio epidemic, Hugh uncovers clues that point to a German plot to sabotage a nearby naval base.

In 1943 sixteen-year-old Erik experiences the horrors of war when he is drafted into the German army and sent to fight on the Russian front.