KDL Recommends

In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she is forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.
Lexile Level: 580
Guided Reading Level: X

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and with the help of the devoted dog Sounder.
Lexile Level: 900
Guided Reading Level: T

Not many things help Howie Crispers forget the war which his father is fighting overseas, with the exception of his teacher, Miss Gossim, but when her job is suddenly in jeopardy, Howie’s efforts turn to saving her.
Lexile Level: 500
Guided Reading Level: S

In 1925, fourteen-year-old Ida Bidson secretly takes over as the teacher when the one-room schoolhouse in her remote Colorado area closes unexpectedly.
Lexile Level: 540
Guided Reading Level: Q

During the Civil War, a twelve-year-old Bowery Boy from New York City joins the Union Army as a drummer, deserts during a battle in Virginia, and encounters a hostile old mountain woman.
Lexile Level: 870
Guided Reading Level: U

In plague-ridden 1602 England, a fifteen-year-old orphan boy, who has become an apprentice actor, goes on the road with Shakespeare’s troupe, and finds out more about his parents along the way.
Lexile Level: 870
Guided Reading Level: W

The journal of a 14-year-old girl, kept the last year she lived on the family farm, records daily events in her small New Hampshire town, her father’s remarriage, and the death of her best friend.
Lexile Level: 960
Guided Reading Level: U

Chronicles the adventures of eleven-year-old Caddie growing up with her six brothers and sisters on the Wisconsin frontier in the mid-nineteenth century.
Lexile Level: 890
Guided Reading Level: R

Annie Moore cares for her two younger brothers on board the ship sailing from Ireland to America where she becomes the first immigrant processed through Ellis Island, January 1, 1892, her fifteenth birthday.
Lexile Level: 320
Guided Reading Level: N

Laura goes to visit her grandfather’s grave at Manzanar, the Japanese-American internment camp where he died, in order to say good-bye to him in her own special way.
Lexile Level: 590
Guided Reading Level: NR

After spending four years with relatives in the South, a fifteen-year-old girl accepts the idea that slaves are property and is horrified to learn when she returns to the North that her home is a station on the underground railroad.
Lexile Level: 720
Guided Reading Level: R

Recounts the tragedy that strikes the Meeker family during the American Revolution when one son joins the rebel forces while the rest of the family tries to stay neutral in a Tory town.
Lexile Level: 770
Guided Reading Level: Y

Twelve-year-old Sam, a passenger on the Titanic’s maiden sea voyage, volunteers to help care for the dogs in the ocean liner’s kennel and becomes fast friends with the Irish setter of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner.
Lexile Level: 780
Guided Reading Level: U

In England during the Middle Ages, a courageous young boy who suddenly loses the use of his legs is forced to learn how to deal with his new disability.
Lexile Level: 990
Guided Reading Level: U

In the diary account of her journey from Ireland in 1847 and of her work in a mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Mary reveals a great longing for her family.
Lexile Level: 710
Guided Reading Level: R

A Native American boy with a special gift to “see” beyond his poor eyesight journeys with an old warrior to a land of mystery and beauty.
Lexile Level: 840
Guided Reading Level: T

When accused of murder in her North Carolina mountain town in 1928, Dovey Coe, a stronged-willed twelve-year-old girl, comes to a new understanding of others, including her deaf brother.
Lexile Level: 980
Guided Reading Level: X

Chronicles the experiences of an Ojibwa girl and her family as they live their lives quietly on an island in Lake Superior in 1847, until the white man comes and begins moving her entire tribe off their land.
Lexile Level: 970
Guided Reading Level: T

A collection of stories of the Civil War recounted by a war-fevered boy, a doctor, a slave woman, a lover of horses, a black man determined to become a soldier, and others form an account of the war’s first great battle.
Lexile Level: 810
Guided Reading Level: Y

A bratty prince and his whipping boy have many adventures when they inadvertently trade places after becoming involved with dangerous outlaws.
Lexile Level: 570
Guided Reading Level: R

Amid the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Leah’s father is faced with the loss of the family farm and puts his farm and equipment up for auction, but Leah comes up with the money by selling her beloved pony.
Lexile Level: 580
Guided Reading Level: O

Recounts Paul Revere’s life as a silversmith and his exciting adventures during the Revolutionary War.
Lexile Level: 830
Guided Reading Level: R

A young girl named Tillie provides a dramatic first-hand account of the tragic battle of July 1-3, 1863 as she recounts the horrors of war, runs from cannonfire, and huddles in the basement with an injured soldier.

Recounts the story of Hannah Goslar, a close friend of Anne Frank and one of the last to see her alive.
Lexile Level: 890
Guided Reading Level: X

In a small Iowa town in 1952, eleven-year-old Charlie Nebraska, whose father died in the Korean War, learns the meanings of both racism and heroism when he befriends a black man who had played baseball in the Negro Leagues.
Lexile Level: 620
Guided Reading Level: S

During World War II, fourteen-year-old Jill Winters arrives in the town of Winter Haven, Maine to stay with her grandmother and, while exploring her new surroundings, stumbles upon a carrier pigeon with a coded message — a discovery that plunges her into a dangerous game of treason and betrayal.
Lexile Level: 670
Guided Reading Level: R

During the early 1900s, eleven-year-old Viney spends her summer working for the local midwife and learns firsthand about birth, death, and “catchin’ babies.”
Lexile Level: 1040
Guided Reading Level: X

While vacationing over the course of several summers in Austria, French siblings Guy and Sarah Masson become best friends with a German boy, until the outbreak of World War I puts them on opposing sides.
Lexile Level: 710
Guided Reading Level: R

In 1611, ten-year-old Elizabeth continues a journal of her experiences living in Jamestown, as her brother Caleb rejoins the family, a new strict governor comes to the colony, and her father considers remarriage.
Lexile Level: 430
Guided Reading Level: P

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.
Lexile Level: NP
Guided Reading Level: X

A thirteen-year-old Jewish orphan leaves her grandmother and immigrates to New York City, where she works for three years earning money to bring Grandmother to the United States, too.
Lexile Level: 470
Guided Reading Level: M

After escaping from an Eastern European concentration camp where he has spent most of his life, a twelve-year-old boy struggles to cope with an entirely strange world as he flees northward to freedom in Denmark.
Lexile Level: 980
Guided Reading Level: NR

Days after arriving in San Francisco from Texas, eleven-year-old orphan Nicholas Dray tries to help his new neighbors survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fires.

Loosely based on the childhood of the America’s first female astronomer, Maria Mitchell, this book recounts the longing of a young nineteenth-century woman to gaze at the stars through her father’s telescope, instead of sewing and cleaning like other girls.
Lexile Level: 790
Guided Reading Level: N

Living on the western Canadian prairie in the nineteenth century, Sweetgrass, a fifteen-year-old Blackfoot Indian girl, saves her family from a smallpox epidemic and proves her maturity to her father.
Lexile Level: 640
Guided Reading Level: NR

In 1864, fifth-grader Charlotte befriends an Irish-American girl at school and tries to understand the prejudices between the Irish and the Yankees in her town of Westfield, Massachusetts.
Lexile Level: 640
Guided Reading Level: V

Sixteen-year-old Hermine Jahns relates her experiences traveling on the first cross-country automobile trip with a woman driver in 1909.
Lexile Level: 1030
Guided Reading Level: V

Jeff Bussey, a Union volunteer, sees the Civil War from both sides when he is sent to spy on Stand Watie and his Confederate Cherokee raiders.
Lexile Level: 910
Guided Reading Level: NR

During the influenza epidemic of 1918 in Duluth, Minnesota, a Jewish city boy, Marven, is sent to a logging camp to avoid the disease and must survive in this new world of forests, snow, grizzly bears, and burly lumberjacks.
Lexile Level: 620
Guided Reading Level: P

When Moses comes to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land, Jesse, a Hebrew slave, finds his life changed by his growing faith in God and his attraction to the half-Egyptian, half-Syrian Jennat.
Lexile Level: 760
Guided Reading Level: NR

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.
Lexile Level: 670
Guided Reading Level: U

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.
Lexile Level: 560
Guided Reading Level: R

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.
Lexile Level: 470
Guided Reading Level: R

A battered child learns to embrace life when he is adopted by an old man in the English countryside during the Second World War.
Lexile Level: 760
Guided Reading Level: Z

Living in the steerage section of a steamship bound for America, Chanah tries to keep her newly found cat a secret.
Lexile Level: 940

To honor his father who died during the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, seventeen-year-old Adam eagerly enlists in the Marines in 1944, survives boot camp, and faces combat on the tiny island of Okinawa.
Lexile Level: 650
Guided Reading Level: V

This illustrated book offers the true story of how a poor African girl was able to attend school after receiving a goat as a gift through a special international project and then sell its milk to get the money needed to buy her books.
Lexile Level: 640
Guided Reading Level: N

Ranofer, a young Egyptian boy, tries to expose his evil stepbrother, Gebu, after he discovers a golden goblet that Gebu has stolen.
Lexile Level: 930
Guided Reading Level: V

After escaping from a train headed for a reservation in Alabama, an Apache boy named Sky is welcomed into the home of a black family, in the story that highlights a lesser-known period of African-American and Native American history.
Lexile Level: 810
Guided Reading Level: X

While attending a Seminole Indian celebration, a black family watches and joins in several exciting dances.
Lexile Level: 600
Guided Reading Level: M

In 1947, twelve-year-old Pattie Mae Sheals is sustained by her dreams of escaping Rich Square, North Carolina, and moving to Harlem when her Uncle Buddy is arrested for attempted rape of a white woman and her grandfather is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor.
Lexile Level: 760
Guided Reading Level: X

Tells the story of a young girl’s dramatic escape from slavery via the Underground Railroad, from the perspective of her beloved rag doll.
Lexile Level: 530
Guided Reading Level: N

Left alone after the deaths of her father and brother who take opposite sides in the War for Independence, and fleeing from the British who seek to arrest her, Sarah Bishop struggles to shape a new life for herself in the wilderness.
Lexile Level: 760
Guided Reading Level: X

Feeling abandoned by her deceased Arapaho mother and her explorer father, Adaline Falling Star runs away from the prejudiced cousins with whom she is staying and comes close to death in the wilderness, with only a mongrel dog for company.
Lexile Level: 720
Guided Reading Level: R

Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters’ village and longs to learn how to create the delicate ceramics himself after he watches master potter Min making his beautiful pottery.
Lexile Level: 920
Guided Reading Level: U

Raised on a poor Vermont farm after tumbling off the back of a wagon as a small child, Jip is astonished years later when a slave catcher reveals that he is the son of a runaway slave and that he is the property of a slave owner.
Lexile Level: 860
Guided Reading Level: V

Impoverished Vermont farm girl Lyddie Worthen is determined to gain her independence by becoming a factory worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1840s.
Lexile Level: 860
Guided Reading Level: U

In 1848, while on a wagon train headed for Oregon, fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is kidnapped by Pawnee Indians and then falls in with a one-armed trapper who teaches him how to live in the wild.
Lexile Level: 830
Guided Reading Level: T

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.
Lexile Level: 750
Guided Reading Level: V

During the Nazi occupation of France, Monique’s mother hides a Jewish family in her basement and tries to help them escape to freedom.
Lexile Level: 430
Guided Reading Level: NR

At the end of the Civil War, twelve-year-old Will, having lost all his immediate family, reluctantly leaves his city home to live in the Virginia countryside with his aunt and the uncle he considers a “traitor” because he refused to take part in the war.
Lexile Level: 800
Guided Reading Level: W

Fifteen-year-old white John Cameron Butler, kidnapped and raised by the Lenape Indians since childhood, is returned to his people under the terms of a treaty and is forced to cope with a strange and different world that is no longer his.
Lexile Level: 870
Guided Reading Level: NR

After being forced to marry and become the Queen of England, sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey is beheaded nine days later due to the political ambitions of her parents, in a nonfictional tale filled with various historical events and figures of the period, such as King Henry VIII and Queen Mary I.
Lexile Level: 670
Guided Reading Level: Y

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.
Lexile Level: 750
Guided Reading Level: V

A well-researched, fast-paced novel recounts the life of Charlotte “Charley” Parkhurst, a daring woman who became a stagecoach driver in the Wild West, as well as the first woman to vote in California, disguised as a man.
Lexile Level: 720
Guided Reading Level: P

After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, thirteen-year-old Tomizu, the American-born son of Japanese immigrants, suddenly becomes the man of the house after his father is arrested and discovers the true meaning of friendship and loyalty.
Lexile Level: 640
Guided Reading Level: W

Lucinda’s New York City visit in the 1890s is a special adventure, thanks to someone who understands ten-year-old little girls.
Lexile Level: 810

A Lebanese man who comes to the United States to seek his fortune suffers several setbacks, but makes his dream come true.
Lexile Level: 540
Guided Reading Level: P

A young Jewish rebel is filled with hatred for the Romans and a desire to avenge his parents’ deaths until Jesus of Nazareth teaches him love and understanding of others.
Lexile Level: 760
Guided Reading Level: U

A young girl from Barbados visits her Puritan relatives in Connecticut only to become the object of a seventeenth-century witch hunt.
Lexile Level: 850
Guided Reading Level: W

Amid the Depression, the Logan family struggles to protect their Mississippi farm and begins to feel the pressures of racial unrest when a friend is unjustly convicted of a crime by a white jury.
Lexile Level: 850
Guided Reading Level: X

During a heavy rainstorm in 1930s rural Mississippi, a ten-year-old white boy sees a bus driver order all the black passengers off a crowded bus to make room for late-arriving white passengers and then set off across the raging Rosa Lee River.
Lexile Level: 810
Guided Reading Level: S

A black family living in Mississippi during the Depression of the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination which its children do not understand.
Lexile Level: 920
Guided Reading Level: W

In 1942, seven-year-old Emi and her Japanese-American family are forced to leave their home, a situation that becomes even more devastating when she loses a precious gold bracelet, a gift from her best friend.
Lexile Level: 710
Guided Reading Level: R

Based on the true story of Elizabeth Freeman, a historical tale is told from the perspective of her fictional sister, Aissa, and follows the young slave’s victorious lawsuit for freedom from her owner.
Lexile Level: 770
Guided Reading Level: T

Eight-year-old Garang, orphaned by a civil war in Sudan, finds the inner strength to help lead other boys as they trek hundreds of miles seeking safety in Ethiopia, then Kenya, and finally in the United States.
Lexile Level: 670
Guided Reading Level: Q

Caleb finds himself in a quandry in which he must choose between following the law or breaking it in order to do what he feels is morally right, when he is asked to help sneak two runaway slaves to freedom through the Texas Underground Railroad.
Lexile Level: 750
Guided Reading Level: S

Tired of her grandfather’s horrific stories of the Holocaust, Hannah learns a lesson about the importance of remembering when she is transported back to Nazi-occupied Poland and is taken to a death camp.
Lexile Level: 730
Guided Reading Level: X