Books like Long Road to Freedom by Kate Messner

In 1943 Copenhagen, ten‑year‑old Annemarie Johansen helps her Jewish friend Ellen Rosen escape Nazi persecution, learning courage and resilience while navigating war‑time hardships.

Taggish the famed canine hero of Jack London’s classic adventure, The Call of the Wild, is uprooted from a comfortable home in California and forced into brutal sled work in the Yukon, where he must confront survival, the call of wilderness, and the pull of his wolf ancestry.

Three teenagers from different eras and continents embark on perilous journeys to escape war, persecution, and tyranny, each facing drowning, bombings and betrayal, yet their stories converge, showing that hope endures across time and borders.

A nine‑year‑old girl named Ada escapes her abusive home amid World War II, joining her brother in London’s evacuation; she learns to ride a pony, reads, and finds a new family with Susan Smith while watching for German spies.

Mia Tang, a young motel‑dweller with a secret dream of becoming a writer, must navigate family, friendship, and cultural identity as she faces the challenges of a new school year.

For my kid

Newbery Honor Book National Book Award Finalist

Ranger the golden retriever is whisked back to first‑century Rome, where he must rescue a young servant and a volunteer gladiator from the horrors of the Colosseum.

In ‘The House of Dies Drear,’ a Black family discovers that their new home, a former Underground Railroad stop, is haunted by secrets that force them to confront their past and the legacy of slavery.

Jack and Annie return to New Orleans on their second adventure, where they face real ghosts, discover jazz, and meet young Louis Armstrong while inspiring artists to spread joy.

Twelve‑year‑old Ellie and her family are forced to leave their town in 1934 and take up a mountain cabin, where she quickly becomes an outdoorswoman and, when needed, a healer.

In 1863 New York, dinosaurs roam while the Civil War rages; orphaned girls from a Colored Asylum join a Brooklyn community of black and brown New Yorkers, training on dactylback to fight the Draft Riots and rescue their kidnapped friends.

This book tells the dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence -- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York -- Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring -- full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage -- and significant -- the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family. - Publisher.

A touching diary of a twelve‑year‑old slave girl’s journey from Alexandria, Virginia, to freedom in St. Catherine’s, Canada, via the Underground Railroad.

Silent Thunder follows eleven‑year‑old Summer and her thirteen‑year‑old brother Rosco, slaves on a Virginia plantation, as they recount how the Civil War changes their world.

Traces the life of the Black woman orator who spoke out against slavery throughout New England and the Midwest.

In 1849, Chinese American girl Samantha seeks to escape tragedy, disguising herself with runaway slave Annamae as male adventurers on the Oregon Trail toward California’s gold rush.

Ghost, Cormac, and Kate, each with unique abilities, join the Black Lotus ninja training school to stop a Samurai‑run Empire from locating the Moon Sword, a powerful relic hidden in sixteenth‑century Japan.