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

A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska

Susan Campbell Bartoletti · 226 pages

Annetka Kaminska is a thirteen-year-old girl living in Russian-controlled Poland in 1896. She bitterly resents the Russians that have taken over her country and are forcing her people to give up their language and customs. But she is even more angry when her father, living in America, arranges a marriage for her, with a Pennsylvania coal miner twice her age. A widower with three little girls, Stan

Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909 (Dear America Series)

Deborah Hopkinson · 188 pages

ngela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory. Against the backdrop of the birth of the labor union movement in the early 1900s, Angela plays a part in the drama and turmoil that erupt

Ashes of Roses

Mary Jane Auch · 250 pages

in 1914, Rose Nolan and her family come to America from Ireland. After some of the family has to be sent back, the rest of her family moves in with her uncle and live there. The book is focused through her point of view. It centers her life as a worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903

Kathryn Lasky · 190 pages

New dreams and old traditions flourish and clash when a Jewish girl and her family emigrate from Russia to America.

The King of Mulberry Street

Donna Jo Napoli · 245 pages

In 1892, Dom, a nine-year old stowaway from Naples, Italy, arrives in New York and must learn to survive the perils of street life in the big city.

A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall

Sarah Ellis · 206 pages

Mai 1926. Originaires d'Angleterre, Evelyn Weatherall, 11 ans, et sa famille émigrent en Saskatchewan après avoir été influencées par la publicité idyllique de l'immigration au Canada. Dans son journal, la fillette relate le quotidien de sa famille (les difficultés de ses parents à trouver un travail stable, l'obligation de son frère aîné à travailler pour payer les dettes de son oncle, les différ

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

The Red Umbrella

Christina Diaz Gonzalez · 284 pages

The Red Umbrella is the moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan--an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution.In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucia Alvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the so

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Maggie's Door

Patricia Reilly Giff · 167 pages

We will dance on the cliffs of Brooklyn.Maggie's Door is the story of the journey from Ireland to America told by both Nory and her neighbor and friend Sean Red Mallon, two different stories with the same destination--the home of Nory's sister Maggie, at 416 Smith Street, Brooklyn, America. Patricia Reilly Giff calls upon her long research into Irish history and her great powers as a storyteller i

The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child

Francisco Jimenez · 134 pages

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Wildflower Girl

Marita Conlon-McKenna · 176 pages

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

Margaret Peterson Haddix · 125 pages

Mrs. Dunphrey agrees not to read the private entries written in her students' English journals, thus Tish Bonner finds herself pouring her emotions into her book in an effort to relieve the pressures in her life that she feels she cannot discuss with anyone.

Esperanza Rising

Pam Munoz Ryan · 262 pages

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

Bread Givers: A Novel

Anzia Yezierska · 297 pages

A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

The Fortunate Pilgrim

Mario Puzo · 301 pages

Lucia Santa has traveled three thousand miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the mafia. M

Threads and Flames

Esther M. Friesner

After recovering from typhus, thirteen-year-old Raisa leaves her Polish shtetl for America to join her older sister, and goes to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

The Distance Between Us

Reyna Grande · 352 pages

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 443 pages

The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant

Away

Amy Bloom · 247 pages

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on N

Dragonwings

Laurence Yep · 248 pages

In the early twentieth century a young Chinese boy joins his father in San Francisco and helps him realize his dream of making a flying machine. In the early twentieth century a young Chinese boy joins his father in San Francisco and helps him realize his dream of making a flying machine. Annotation. Will Windrider take to the skies? Moon shadow is eight years old when he sails from China to join