2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Historical Fiction

The Exiles : A Novel

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naive  young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to 'the land beyond the seas, ' Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.

I Survived series

Lauren Tarshis' New York Times bestselling I Survived series tells stories of young people and their resilience and strength in the midst of unimaginable disasters—from the Revolutionary War to the sinking of the Titanic to the September 11 terrorist attacks—through the eyes of a young witness.

Island Queen: A Novel

A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free Black woman who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. 

Hour of the Witch

Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in The New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life. But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, Mary soon finds herself the object of suspicion and rumor.

Calling Me Home

In Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler, eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. It's a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drop everything to drive Isabelle from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. With no clear explanation why. Tomorrow. Curious whether she can unlock the secrets of Isabelle's guarded past, she agrees, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives.

An American Girl series

The American Girl series, by various authors, is a collection of novels set within toy line's fictional universe. Since its inception, American Girl has published books based on dolls, with novels and other media to tie in with their dolls. The books follow various American girls throughout both historical eras and contemporary settings.

Libertie

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother's choices and is hungry for something else. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men.

Blood Heir

In the Cyrilian Empire, Affinites are reviled. Their varied gifts to control the world around them are deemed unnatural--even dangerous. And Anastacya Mikhailov, the crown princess, is one of the most terrifying Affinites.

Ana's ability to control blood has long been kept secret, but when her father, the emperor, is murdered, she is the only suspect. Now, to save her own life, Ana must find her father's killer. But the Cyrilia beyond the palace walls is one where corruption rules and a greater conspiracy is at work--one that threatens the very balance of Ana's world.

The Other Merlin

Welcome to the great kingdom of Camelot. Prince Arthur’s a depressed botanist who would rather marry a library than a princess, Lancelot’s been demoted to castle guard after a terrible misunderstanding, and nothing is going according to plan. Then Arthur accidentally pulls the sword from the stone (in his defense, he was drunk and mostly kidding), and now everyone’s convinced he’s some prophesied hero.

The Sea Knows My Name

In this seafaring fantasy, a soft-spoken and empathic teen must chart her own course to rescue the ruthless pirate who raised her

If there’s one thing Thea Fowler has learned from her mother, it’s that the only way for a woman to survive in a man’s world is to make herself strong—invulnerable, even. Strength, after all, is how Clementine Fowler survived after her world was washed away by ash and lava and became one of the most notorious pirates the world has ever known.

Unfortunately, Thea has inherited none of her mother’s ruthlessness and grit.