AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson, Virginia to Canada West, 1863-1864

Karleen Bradford · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, Belmont Plantation, Virginia 1859

Patricia C. McKissack · 192 pages

In 1859 twelve-year-old Clotee, a house slave who must conceal the fact that she can read and write, records in her diary her experiences and her struggle to decide whether to escape to freedom.

Diary FormatSlavery DepictedMiddle GradeEmotional
❤️

I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl, Mars Bluff, South Carolina 1865 (Dear America Series)

Joyce Hansen · 202 pages

The two-time Coretta Scott King Honor Book recipient offers a poignant narrative about a freed slave girl during the Reconstruction Era in the South.

Slavery DepictedDiary FormatMiddle GradeEmotional
❤️

So Far From Home: the Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847

Barry Denenberg · 170 pages

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.

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
❤️

Making Bombs for Hitler

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistMiddle Grade
❤️
Diary FormatSurvival StorySlavery DepictedEmotional
❤️

Forge

Laurie Halse Anderson · 320 pages

Separated from his friend Isabel after their daring escape from slavery, fifteen-year-old Curzon serves as a free man in the Continental Army at Valley Forge until he and Isabel are thrown together again, as slaves once more.

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryMiddle GradeEmotional
❤️

Underground to Canada

Barbara Smucker · 150 pages

Two slave girls escape from a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, and steal toward Canada on the Underground Railroad.

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryMiddle GradeEmotional
❤️

Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
❤️

Across The Wide And Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary Of Hattie Campbell

Kristiana Gregory · 165 pages

Now that we're in the North Platte River Valley the air feels dry and thin. My lips are so chapped they bleed when I talk. The only thing to do is dip our fingers in to the bucket of axle grease and rub our lips every hour or so. It smells bad, it tastes bad, and the blowing dust sticks. It feels like we must be halfway to Oregon, but Tall Joe says, no, we've only gone five hundred miles. He al

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
❤️

The Starving Time

Patricia Hermes · 109 pages

Elizabeth Barker continues to write to her "friend," her diary, as disease and lack of food further plague the suffering settlers at Jamestown.

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
❤️

Survival in the Storm: The Dust Bowl Diary of Grace Edwards

Katelan Janke · 186 pages

In sixteen-year-old Katelan Janke's first Dear America book, we meet Grace Edwards, a little girl growing up in the heart of the Texas panhandle, in the midst of the Dust Bowl. Fierce, dust-filled winds ravage the plains and threaten the town's agricultural livelihood, creating poverty and despair among Grace's neighbors. Will her family's farm survive?

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
🙂

The Great Plague: The Diary of Alice Paynton, London, 1665-1666

Pamela Oldfield · 192 pages

A time of horror has come to London. In one terrible summer, more than 15% of its population will perish. As the bubonic plague ravages London's streets, mercilessly plucking up victims and filling the plague pits with corpses, 13-year-old Alice Paynton records the outbreak in her diary. "It seems that in the past week 700 people have died of the plague. So the plague has well and truly come to Lo

Diary FormatMiddle GradeTeen ProtagonistEmotional
🙂
Diary FormatSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistMiddle Grade
🙂

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

Avi · 235 pages

As the only passenger, and the only female, on a transatlantic voyage in 1832, thirteen-year-old Charlotte finds herself caught between a murderous captain and a mutinous crew.

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
🙂

Runaway

Wendelin Van Draanen · 256 pages

"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.Through tough and tender and angry and funny journal entries, Holly spills out her story. We travel with her across

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeEmotional
🙂

The Hunger: The Diary of Phyllis McCormack, Ireland, 1845-1847

Carol Drinkwater · 208 pages

It's 1845 and blight has destroyed the precious potato crop leaving Ireland starving. Phyllis works hard to support her struggling family, but when her mother's health deteriorates she sets off in search of her rebel brother and is soon swept up in thefight for a free and fair Ireland.

Diary FormatSurvival StoryMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
🙂

Unbound: A Novel in Verse

Ann E. Burg · 345 pages

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who l

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
🙂
Slavery DepictedMiddle GradeEmotionalTeen Protagonist
🙂

The Wanderer

Sharon Creech · 298 pages

The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in. Thirteen-year-old Sophie is the only girl amongst the surly crew of The Wanderer made up of her three uncles and two cousins. They sail across the Atlantic toward England, the land of Bompie, her grandfather. The sea calls to Sophie -- promising adventure and the chance to explore and discover. But the per

Diary FormatSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistMiddle Grade
🙂

Outcast

Rosemary Sutcliff · 229 pages

Fifteen-year-old Beric feels increasingly bitter isolation when, because of his Roman birth, he is cast out by the Celtic tribe that raised him and, after reaching a Roman settlement, he is sold into slavery and sentenced to serve in a galley for the rest of his life.

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
🙂

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · 285 pages

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century. Since its publication in 1947, it has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world. It remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Restored in this Definitive Edition are diary entries that were omitted from the original edition. T

Diary FormatSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Wolf Den

Elodie Harper · 464 pages

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

Life As We Knew It

Susan Beth Pfeffer · 356 pages

Miranda lives a normal life in a normal family. When an asteroid is scheduled to hit the moon, nobody realized that it would change the world forever. Together with her family, Miranda must struggle to survive and hope for help.

Diary FormatSurvival StoryEmotionalTeen Protagonist
🙂

Addy, an American girl Boxed Set

Connie Rose Porter · 460 pages

Slavery DepictedSurvival StoryMiddle GradeHistorical Fiction
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗