Reading Recommendations: A Journey To The Past
A new month means another batch of reading recommendations! July’s theme is A Journey To The Past. These book picks focus on stories grounded in history covering different timelines and important narratives. Enjoy these picks!
Scarlet Carnation
1915. May and Naomi are extended family, their grandmothers’ lives inseparably entwined on a Virginia plantation in the volatile time leading up to the Civil War. For both women, the twentieth century promises social transformation and equal opportunity.
May, a young white woman, is on the brink of achieving the independent life she’s dreamed of since childhood. Naomi, a nurse, mother, and leader of the NAACP, has fulfilled her own dearest desire: buying a home for her family. But they both are about to learn that dreams can be destroyed in an instant. May’s future is upended, and she is forced to rely once again on her mother. Meanwhile, the white-majority neighborhood into which Naomi has moved is organizing against her while her sons are away fighting for their country.
In the tumult of a changing nation, these two women—whose grandmothers survived the Civil War—support each other’s quest for liberation and dignity. Both find the strength to confront injustice and the faith to thrive on their chosen paths.
I like that Ibrahim is very open about 20th century America and the difficulties many people faced. We see how especially women had to fight for gender equality, and she goes into depth about racism, sexism, disabilities, and economic disparities of the time. Though May and Naomi struggle with multiple problems throughout their lives and are they trying to persevere over obstacles. I really love how the alternating perspectives propel you through the story and keep the reader interested.This was a beautiful moving novel and very emotional at times. I loved seeing the growth of the main characters and how their stories intertwine and evolve over the narrative.
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group women were also aggressively barred from—had the right stuff. But as the 1980s dawned so did new thinking, and six elite women scientists—Sally Ride, Judith Resnik, Anna Lee Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon—set out to prove they had exactly the right stuff to become the first US women astronauts.
In The Six Young Readers Edition, acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows how these brilliant and courageous women fought to enter STEM fields they were discouraged from pursuing, endured claustrophobic—and often deeply sexist—media attention, underwent rigorous survival training, and prepared for years to take multi-million-dollar equipment into orbit.
Growing up I learned about Sally Ride, but it was great to learn about other female astronauts that were breaking boundaries for women in space. This book chronicles their journey to working for NASA, snippets of their personal lives, and what factors led them to pursuing their dreams. It is an inspiring book to get a further glimpse of these important women’s historical achievements and how they would pave the way for future generations. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know about how these space missions come into fruition and have a greater understanding of how much training goes into their jobs.
Junie
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.
When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.
With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?
Junie is an emotional ride from beginning to end as Crosby crafts a story of teenager trying to carve out her own life (despite the confines of society). As Crosby states in her author note she wanted to shining a light on the individual humanity of enslaved people which this novel does. It does not shy away from the atrocities and horrors of slavery but manages to weave a strong narrative of hope through the viewpoint of the main character Junie. Most importantly it’s a story about healing and dealing with grief. This is a debut was written thoughtfully and beautifully. I highly recommend this novel to readers who enjoy historical fiction narratives.
All We Were Promised
The paths of three young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia unexpectedly—and dangerously—collide in this debut novel inspired by the explosive history of a divided city.
Philadelphia, 1837 . After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.
Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.
All We Were Promised is a riveting historical fiction novel by Lattimore that is told through multiple point-of-views. The story follows Evie, Nell, and Charlotte as their lives intertwine in 1830s Philadelphia. The novel showcases the wide juxtaposition between the free and enslaved community as well as Abolitionists fighting for Civil Rights. I felt the alternating viewpoints gave readers a deeper insight into the characters and their backgrounds and how different their lives are from each other. Each character Is very vulnerable but also confident wanting to write the wrongs of their past and to help others. Nell especially sticks her neck out to help those even though it is frowned upon by the high society background that she comes from.
Ophie’s Ghosts
Ophelia Harrison used to live in a small house in the Georgia countryside. But that was before the night in November 1922, and the cruel act that took her home and her father from her. Which was the same night that Ophie learned she can see ghosts.
Now Ophie and her mother are living in Pittsburgh with relatives they barely know. In the hopes of earning enough money to get their own place, Mama has gotten Ophie a job as a maid in the same old manor house where she works.
Daffodil Manor, like the wealthy Caruthers family who owns it, is haunted by memories and prejudices of the past–and, as Ophie discovers, ghosts as well. Ghosts who have their own loves and hatreds and desires, ghosts who have wronged others and ghosts who have themselves been wronged. And as Ophie forms a friendship with one spirit whose life ended suddenly and unjustly, she wonders if she might be able to help–even as she comes to realize that Daffodil Manor may hold more secrets than she bargained for.
Ophie’s Ghosts is an enthralling middle-grade novel filled with mysterious and disturbing secrets that lie within the Daffodil Manor. After a tragedy, Ophie and her mother are forced to leave everything they’ve known and start a new life in Pittsburgh. I appreciated the rich history in the novel and how it teaches middle-grade readers about the horrors and history of racism. The story was very emotional at times as ghosts are used as a metaphor for the ghosts of the character’s past and America’s as well. This novel teaches its intended audience that readers should never forget the past and always be willing to listen and learn.
That concludes my reading recommendations for historical themed books! What books do you recommend or what are your favorites? Comment below!
I think I’d like to read Ophie’s story (and, what is it about 1922…I feel like I’ve come across this year a lot, in books and on film). I’m reading the 50th edition of Margaret Walker’s classic novel Jubilee, a historical family saga set in the U.S. but I haven’t gotten too far yet (I always avoid the heaviest, literally I mean, books in the stack cuz they’re awkward to hang onto).