Books like Virgie Goes to School with Us Boys by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard

A charming first look at early American pioneer life, following young Laura Ingalls and her family as they live in a simple Wisconsin cabin, learn chores, and grow together on the Big Woods frontier.

Miss Hickory, a twig‑crafted country doll, spends a winter alone after her owner leaves for Boston. With the help of farm and forest animals, she learns the value of accepting aid and offering her own support.

Twin siblings Ohkwa'ri and his sister navigate the challenges of Mohawk village life in the late 1400s, learning to respect older boys and finding peace amid conflict.

A charming picture book in which a country house laments the growth of the surrounding city, illustrating the quiet loss of rural life as urban sprawl encroaches.

Historical YA fiction set in 1937 New London, Texas, after a school explosion, following interracial teens Naomi and Wash as they confront race, segregation and love amid tragedy.

A story of perseverance and determination in early 19th century Philadelphia.

A first‑person diary of fourteen‑year‑old Dawn Rae Johnson as she confronts racism while attending the first integrated school in her Virginia town after Brown v. Board.

In this children’s story, Wade struggles with a new special‑gifted fourth‑grade class and concocts a plan to send 213 celebrity‑signed valentines to cope.

At 6:30 on the evening of December 21, 1973, Vivienne Loomis walked into her mother's empty silversmithing studio at their home in Melrose, Massachusetts, tied a rope around her neck, and hanged herself. Vivienne was fourteen years and four months old. She was attractive, intelligent, and especially gifted at writing, yet she suffered from so intense and unutterable a despair that she was driven to take her own life. Why? *Vivienne* is a loving portrait of a troubled girl, as well as a professionally innovative examination of an alarming and mysterious epidemic: adolescent suicide. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among all Americans aged fifteen to nineteen. From the extensive material Vivienne Loomis left behind - a long diary and personal journal, a collection of searing poems and school compositions, and several letters to a beloved teacher - clinical psychiatrist John Mack and writing teacher Holly Hickler narrate the final two years of Vivienne's emotional life, using her words as much as possible. They then examine the events of those anguished last months - her personality development, family, school and social relationships - in "an effort to understand the forces that led Vivienne to her decision." Finally, they "consider her death in relation to the increasings national problem of adolescent suicide" and suggest an important new way in which to approach this frightening phenomenon. According to the authors, this book "is written with the hope that is can be meaningful to anyone close to adolescents: therapists and counselors, teachers whose daily experience must include depressed young people, families struggling with the problem of adolescent suicide. We hope, too, that Vivienne can live again in these pages as the sensitive, remarkable young girl she was." *Vivienne* is a book that is heartbreaking yet hopeful, for it offers a rare look inside - and an articulate understanding of - the too-often-secret adolescent world.

A story about a plant scientist teaching children about gardening and nature's bounty.

Friends Zander, Kambui, LaShonda, and Bobbi, caught in the middle of a mock Civil War at DaVinci Academy and learn the true cost of freedom of speech when they use their alternative newspaper, The Cruiser, to try to make peace.