Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan and her family are grateful to have finally reached America, the great land of opportunity. Their happiness is shattered when part of their family is forced to return to Ireland. Rose wants to succeed and stays in New York with her younger sister Maureen. The sisters struggle to survive and barely do so by working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Then, just as Rose is forming friendships and settling in, a devastating fire forces her, Maureen, and their friends to fight for their lives.  (M,J,S)

The Armenian Holocaust forces 12 year-old orphan Vahan on the run, who survives by begging, pretending to be deaf and mute, dressing as a girl, hiding out in basements and outhouses, and doing whatever he can to stay alive.  (S)

Bella, newly arrived in New York from Italy, gets a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. There, along with hundreds of other immigrants, she works long hours at a grueling job under terrible conditions. Yetta, a coworker from Russia, has been crusading for a union, and when factory conditions worsen, she helps workers rise up in a strike. Wealthy Jane learns of the plight of the workers and becomes involved with their cause. Bella and Yetta are at work - and Jane is visiting the factory - on March 25, 1911, when a spark ignites some cloth and the building is engulfed in fire, leading to one of the worst workplace disasters ever.  (J,S)

Guy and Sarah Masson have traveled with their parents from Paris to a small resort village on Lake Constance, in Austria, where the two soon befriend a ten-year-old Austrian boy, Willy Schiller. They swim and race their model sailboats in the lake, fight mock duels as knights through the woods, and play chess in their rooms when it rains. The three become inseparable that first summer, and each year thereafter their friendship grows - until the summer of 1914. Suddenly the world is at war, and these best of friends find themselves on opposing sides.  (M,J)

Jarrett is sixteen - man enough to reject the railroad job his father wants him to take, man enough to court Lizbeth Whitcomb, man enough to join the fight against the forest fires that are destroying Idaho and Montana. But the flames are faster than anyone has dreamed, and soon the fire has come between Jarrett and his home, between Jarrett and Lizbeth, and thrown him into the company of a young black private named Seth, whose own plans to desert the army have been cut short by the disaster.  (M,J)

Asia McKinna comes of age in a rural Texas town during World War I. She struggles to understand the frailty of her grandmother, the strain of the war, her intensifying feelings for her friend Nick Grissom, and the uneasiness caused by the mysterious fires plaguing her town. Through her growing passion for photography, she hopes eventually to gain perspective on the times--and on her place in the world.  (M,J)

Although conditions in Sherborn Women's Prison are miserable, the inmates' spirits soar when the new chaplain decides to stage a musical: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. The show transforms the women, and no one is changed more than sixteen-year-old Libby Dodge, who discovers she's a natural performer. But Libby is still bound by her prison sentence and shadowed by her murky past. Gilbert and Sullivan may make prison life more bearable, but can musical theater set her free?  (J,S)

For years, sixteen-year-old Hattie's been shuttled between relatives. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she courageously leaves Iowa to prove up on her late uncle's homestead claim near Vida, Montana. There, Hattie faces frost, drought and blizzards. Despite many hardships, Hattie forges ahead, sharing her adventures with her friends - especially Charlie, fighting in France - through letters and articles for her hometown paper.  (J,S)

An English boy during World War I comes to believe that the battles he enacts with his toy soldiers control the war his father is fighting on the front. (M,J)

Rilla, almost fifteen, can't think any further ahead than going to her very first dance at the Four Winds lighthouse and getting her first kiss from handsome Kenneth Ford. But undreamed-of challenges await the irrepressible Rilla when the world of Ingleside becomes endangered by a far-off war. Her brothers go off to fight, and Rilla brings home an orphaned newborn in a soup tureen. She is swept into a drama that tests her courage and leaves her changed forever.  (M,J,S)

Third Sister in the Tao family, Ailin has watched her two older sisters go through the painful process of having their feet bound. In China in 1911, all the women of good families follow this ancient tradition. But Ailin loves to run away from her governess and play games with her male cousins. Knowing she will never run again once her feet are bound, Ailin rebels and refuses to follow this torturous tradition. As a result, however, the family of her intended husband breaks their marriage agreement. And as she enters adolescence, Ailin finds that her family is no longer willing to support her. Chinese society leaves few options for a single woman of good family, but with a bold conviction and an indomitable spirit, Ailin is determined to forge her own destiny. (J,S)

In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers - and Turner's - want to change into a tourist spot.  (M,J,S)

Francie Nolan, avid reader and adroit observer of human nature, is growing up in Brooklyn in 1912, with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her love too freely - to men, and to a brother who will always be the favored child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and the value of a penny. Like the city trees that grow out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive.  (A/YA)

In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.  (J,S)

Fifteen-year-old Jim Hay cannot wait for his turn to fight in World War I. But as his father marches off to battle, Jim must be content to record his thoughts and dreams in his journal. Gradually, however, Jim's simple life begins to unravel. His father is killed in action, his mother suffers a breakdown, and when he does at last join up, What he discovers in the trenches of France is enough to dispel any romantic view of the war. And while his longing for adventure is replaced by a basic need to survive, the final tragic outcome is one he never dreamed of.  (J,S)