Posts tagged as:

young adults

What Is it with Wars?: Overrepresented Areas in Historical Fiction

By Melissa L.
While many areas are underrepresented in historical fiction, there are also some that are way overrepresented. That’s not to say that books about these topics don’t need to be on the market, but they take up an incredibly large share.
In historical fiction about the United States, the overrepresented areas can be expressed in [...]

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Periods and Places: Not All Created Equal

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By Melissa L.
When a fellow children’s author asked for a book set in ancient Rome and no one could recommend anything suitable, I began to think about periods and places that are underrepresented in historical fiction for kids. A few that immediately come to mind include:

Ancient Rome, Greece, and Persia. (Especially Persia. I don’t think [...]

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Paradoxes of the French Revolution

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Historical Fiction and the Newbery Award

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2009: A Great Year for History and Historical Fiction

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Journals and Diaries in Historical Fiction

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By Melissa L.
The diary is a narrative form that’s especially popular in historical fiction for children. The best-known example is probably the Dear America series, which was published by Scholastic in the late 1990’s. The format is very difficult to pull off—your narrator’s voice has to be perfect, and since you’re writing about specific days [...]

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Language Issues (Continued)

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By Melissa L.
Today I’m going to continue last week’s post on language in historical fiction. You’d think that after deciding what to do about foreign words in your novel, you’re pretty much safe. You can just write the rest of your novel in regular English, right? Well, not exactly.

A few years ago, an editor critiquing [...]

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