Oldham County Public Library
Children's Book Suggestions
Each week we will be providing book suggestions to help you select great books your children will love! This week we are featuring Historical Picture Books and Historical Juvenile Fiction Novels!
Books can be placed on hold and staff will gather them and you can pick them up at our drive-thru at the Main branch in LaGrange or curbside at South Oldham and Mahan M-Thur 1-7 PM, Fridays 1-5 PM and Satrudays 10-2 PM.

Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop : the Sanitation Strike of 1968 This historical fiction picture book presents the story of nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson, who in 1968 witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final stand for justice before his assassination--when her father, a sanitation worker, participated in the protest. | Island Born Lola was just a baby when her family left the Island. So when she has to draw it for a school assignment, she asks her family, friends, and neighbors about their memories of her homeland. In the process, she comes up with a new way of understanding her own heritage. | Gittel's Journey: an Ellis Island StoryBrings to life a not too distant history of immigration to Ellis Island. When it's time for nine-year-old Gittel and her mother to leave their homeland behind and go to America for the promise of a new life, a health inspection stops any chance of Gittel's mother joining her daughter on the voyage. Knowing she may never see her mother again, Gittel must find the courage within herself to leave her family behind. |
Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop : the Sanitation Strike of 1968
Island Born
Gittel's Journey: an Ellis Island Story
Brings to life a not too distant history of immigration to Ellis Island. When it's time for nine-year-old Gittel and her mother to leave their homeland behind and go to America for the promise of a new life, a health inspection stops any chance of Gittel's mother joining her daughter on the voyage. Knowing she may never see her mother again, Gittel must find the courage within herself to leave her family behind.
All Different Now : Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom In 1865, members of a family start their day as slaves, working in a Texas cotton field, and end it celebrating their freedom on what came to be known as Juneteenth. | Elephant Quilt: Stitch By Stitch to California Lily Rose and Grandma stitch a quilt that tells the story of their family's journey from Missouri to California by covered wagon in 1859. | Brush of the Gods During the Tang dynasty, master painter Wu Daozi creates an extraordinary mural for the emperor. |
All Different Now : Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom
Elephant Quilt: Stitch By Stitch to California
Freedom Soup Every year, Haitians all over the world ring in the new year by eating a special soup, a tradition dating back to the Haitian Revolution. This year, Ti Gran is teaching Belle how to make the soup--Freedom Soup--just like she was taught when she was a little girl. Together, they dance and clap as they prepare the holiday feast, and Ti Gran tells Belle about the history of the soup, the history of Belle's family, and the history of Haiti, where Belle's family is from. | Nile Crossing Khepri, who lives in ancient Egypt, begins to feel nervous as he and his father travel to Thebes for Khepri's first day of scribe school. | Mary and Her Little Lamb: the True Story of the Famous Nursery Rhyme In 1810s Massachusetts, young Mary Elizabeth Sawyer nurses a sickly lamb back to health and becomes the subject of a famous nursery rhyme. Includes facts about the real Mary, John Roulstone who wrote the rhyme, and Lowell Mason who set it to music. |
Freedom Soup
Nile Crossing
Mary and Her Little Lamb: the True Story of the Famous Nursery Rhyme
The Village that Vanished In southeastern Africa, a young Yao girl and her mother find a way for their fellow villagers to escape approaching slave traders. | Overground Railroad In poems, illustrated with collage art, a perceptive girl tells the story of her train journey from North Carolina to New York City as part of the Great Migration. Each leg of the trip brings new revelations as scenes out the window of folks working in fields give way to the Delaware River, the curtain that separates the colored car is removed, and glimpses of the freedom and opportunity the family hopes to find come into view | Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down This picture book is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the momentous Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in, when four college students staged a peaceful protest that became a defining moment in the struggle for racial equality and the growing civil rights movement. |
The Village that Vanished
Overground Railroad
Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down
Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building n 1931, a boy and his father watch as the world's tallest building, the Empire State Building, is constructed, step-by-step, near their Manhattan home. | This is the Rope: a Story from the Great Migration A rope passed down through the generations frames an African American family's story as they journey north during the time of the Great Migration. | Freedom in Congo Square Six days a week, slaves labor from sunup to sundown and beyond, but on Sunday afternoons, they gather with free blacks at Congo Square outside New Orleans, free from oppression. Includes foreword about Congo Square by Freddi Williams Evans, glossary, and historical notes. |
Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building
This is the Rope: a Story from the Great Migration
Blue Sky White Stars A stirring poetic tribute to the beauty and wonder of America's symbols, history, landscape. | The Sandman: the Story of Sanderson Mansnoozie Provides the background, history, and life of Sanderson Mansnoozie, better known as the Sandman, who helps the Man in the Moon keep children safe at night by bringing them sweet dreams. | William's House Arriving in New England in 1637, William is determined to recreate his home in England but realizes that the climate requires modifications to it. |
Blue Sky White Stars
The Sandman: the Story of Sanderson Mansnoozie
The Scrambled States of America Talent Show The states decide to get together and put on a show featuring their particular talents. Also includes facts about the history and geography of the states. | The Turtle Ship An adaptation of the legend of Sunsin Yi, a young boy in sixteenth-century Korea, who, inspired by his pet turtle, designs one of the greatest battleships in history and fulfills his dream of sailing the world. | John, Paul, George, and Ben A humorous look at five of our country's founding fathers. |
The Scrambled States of America Talent Show
The Turtle Ship

Sarah, Plain and Tall When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay. | A Single Shard Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself. | The Green Glass Sea In 1943, eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan lives with her scientist father in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as he works on a top secret government program, and befriends an aspiring artist who is a misfit just like her. |
Sarah, Plain and Tall
A Single Shard
The Birchbark House 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. | Ahimsa Gandhi asks for one member of each family to join the fight for independence from the British. When ten-year-old Anjali's mother is jailed for doing so, Anjali must step out of her comfort zone to take over her mother's work. | Other Words for Home Sent with her mother to the safety of a relative's home in Cincinnati when her Syrian hometown is overshadowed by violence, Jude worries for the family members who were left behind as she adjusts to a new life with unexpected surprises. |
The Birchbark House
Ahimsa
Queen of the Sea When her sister seizes the throne, Queen Eleanor of Albion is banished to a tiny island off the coast of her kingdom, where the nuns of the convent spend their days peacefully praying, sewing, and gardening. But the island is also home to Margaret, a mysterious young orphan girl whose life is upturned when the cold, regal stranger arrives. As Margaret grows closer to Eleanor, she grapples with the revelation of the island's sinister true purpose as well as the truth of her own past. When Eleanor's life is threatened, Margaret is faced with a perilous choice between helping Eleanor and protecting herself. | White Bird: A Wonder Story Tells the story of Julian's GrandmerÌŒe's childhood as she, a Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II and how the boy she once shunned became her savior and best friend. | One Crazy Summer In the summer of 1968, after travelling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp. |
Queen of the Sea
White Bird: A Wonder Story
One Crazy Summer
The Witch of Blackbird Pond Kit Tyler must leave behind shimmering Caribbean islands to join the stern Puritan community of her relatives. She soon feels caged, until she meets the old woman known as the Witch of Blackbird Pond. But when their friendship is discovered, Kit herself is accused of witchcraft! | Esperanza Rising 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. | The War that Saved My Life A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother. |
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Esperanza Rising
Finding Langston Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied. | The Inquisitor's Tale Crossing paths at an inn, thirteenth-century travelers impart the tales of a monastery oblate, a Jewish refugee, and a psychic peasant girl with a loyal greyhound, the three of whom join forces on a chase through France to escape persecution. | Number the Stars In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis. |
Finding Langston
The Inquisitor's Tale
Chains After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War. | Crispin: The Cross of Lead Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret. | Al Capone Does My Shirts A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister. |
Chains
Crispin: The Cross of Lead
Countdown Fanny Chapman just wants some peace. But that's hard to get when her best friend is feuding with her, her sister has disappeared, and her uncle is fighting an old war in his head. Her saintly younger brother is no help, and the cute boy across the street only complicates things. Worst of all, everyone is walking around just waiting for a bomb to fall. It's 1962, and it seems the whole country is living in fear. | A Long Way from Chicago A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother. | The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg Twelve-year-old Homer, a poor but clever orphan, has extraordinary adventures after running away from his evil uncle to rescue his brother, who has been sold into service in the Civil War. |