Best Children's European Biographies

A Newbery Honor Book author has written a powerful and gripping novel about a youth in Nazi Germany who tells the truth about Hitler. Bartoletti has taken one episode from her Newbery Honor Book, HITLER YOUTH, and fleshed it out into thought-provoking novel. Grade 6–9—In the newly formed Third Reich, Hitler's initial political doctrine is filled with hopeful solutions for a country plagued with unemployment, poverty, and a post-World War I feeling of defeat. Beaten and tortured to name his friends, he remembers how he started off an ardent Nazi follower and then began to question his patriotism, secretly listened to BBC radio broadcasts, and finally dared to write and distribute pamphlets calling for resistance. The teen’s perspective makes this a particularly gripping way to personalize the history, and even those unfamiliar with the background Bartoletti weaves in–the German bitterness after World War I, the burning of the books, the raging anti-Semitism––will be enthralled by the story of one boy’s heroic resistance in the worst of times. A lengthy author’s note distinguishes fact from fiction, and Bartoletti provides a detailed chronology, a bibliography, and many black-and-white photos of Helmuth with friends, family, and members of his Mormon church.

To forge an incredibly powerful political alliance, thirteen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria is betrothed to Dauphin Louis Auguste, who will one day be the king of France. Through the pages of her diary, Marie captures the isolation, the lavish parties and gowns, her struggle to find her place, and the years leading up her ascendance of the throne . In this engrossing addition to the Royal Diaries series ( Elizabeth I: Red Rose of the House of Tudor , Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile ), Kathryn Lasky invents a diary of the young Marie Antoinette in 1769--the year she is to be married off to Dauphin Louis Auguste, eldest grandson of the French king Louis XV. Arranged marriages were common in that day and age--as the Empress Theresa (of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nations) sought to consolidate power among nations by marrying off her children. Fortunately, her story is given plenty of context with an epilogue describing the history of the young Queen after 1769, a historical note offering an 18th-century context, a Habsburg-Bourbon family tree, and various portraits of the royal family. Notes and a family tree are useful for readers who know little of 18th-century royalty and politics. This will be a popular addition for readers who favor the diary format in historical fiction.

Teach Your Kids To Brush Their Teeth's. *********************************************. Bacteria Joe came to check my teeth last night, He smelled leftover chocolate, what a delight! The combination of catchy rhymes spiced with humor and an ethical message appeals to the hearts of children.

A delightful adveture full of humor and heart set in Elizabethan England! Widge is an orphan with a rare talent for shorthand. Widge mentions square city blocks, describes his dinner kept warm on the back of the stove and notes that a man wounded in a duel had recovered in a hospitalAthis in an age of unplanned cities, meals cooked over open fires and hospitals that were for terminally ill paupers. Lonely outcast Widge is a sympathetic character, but his frequent shifts in voice from Yorkshire dialect to 20th-century American slang may be disconcerting to readers, and the villainy of Widge's nemesis seems all too familiar. Each voice is tailored to fit the subtleties of the character, as in the wicked Falconer.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s.