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🧲 Books like this

Heart of a Samurai

Margi Preus · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Way of the Warrior

Chris Bradford

JapanBelongingCultural IdentityTeen Protagonist
❤️

Shōgun

James Clavell · 979 pages

After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen--Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and free

JapanOcean and ShipsCultural IdentitySurvival Story
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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.

BelongingSurvival StoryOcean and ShipsTeen Protagonist
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Julie of the Wolves

Jean Craighead George · 170 pages

Miyax, like many adolescents, is torn. But unlike most, her choices may determine whether she lives or dies. At 13, an orphan, and unhappily married, Miyax runs away from her husband's parents' home, hoping to reach San Francisco and her pen pal. But she becomes lost in the vast Alaskan tundra, with no food, no shelter, and no idea which is the way to safety. Now, more than ever, she must look har

BelongingCultural IdentityMiddle GradeSurvival Story
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Northwind

Gary Paulsen · 242 pages

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryAdventureMiddle Grade
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Refugee

Alan Gratz · 352 pages

Although separated by continents and decades, Josef, a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany; Isabel, a Cuban girl trying to escape the riots and unrest plaguing her country in 1994; and Mahmoud, a Syrian boy in 2015 whose homeland is torn apart by violence and destruction, embark on harrowing journeys in search of refuge, discovering shocking connections that tie their stories together.

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
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Naruto, Vol. 01: The Tests of the Ninja

Masashi Kishimoto · 192 pages

JapanBelongingTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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The Sign of the Beaver

Elizabeth George Speare · 135 pages

Left alone to guard the family's wilderness home in eighteenth-century Maine, a boy is hard-pressed to survive until local Indians teach him their skills.

Survival StoryMiddle GradeTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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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.

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
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Kidnapped

Robert Louis Stevenson · 278 pages

KIDNAPPED is an adventure story that has become the model for any thriller of escape and suspense. Set in 1751, the flight of David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Highlands of Scotland is based on real events. Though he wrote the book to make money, while living as an invalid in Bournemouth. Stevenson was proud of it; he inscribed a presentation copy with the couplet. Here is the one sound

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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Exodus

Leon Uris · 626 pages

The lives of many people were involved in the long-dreamed-of birth of the new Israeli nation. A novel of Israel.

BelongingCultural IdentitySurvival StoryHistorical Fiction
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The Convicts

Iain Lawrence · 198 pages

After seeing his father hauled off to debtor's prison, Tom Tin sets out to take revenge on Mr. Goodfellow, the man responsible for his family's misfortunes. But the fog-filled London streets are teeming with sinister characters. Tom encounters a blind man who scavenges the riverbed for treasure--and wants what Tom digs up; Worms, a body snatcher who reveals a shocking surprise; and a nasty gang of

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryAdventureTeen Protagonist
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Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Alex Haley · 704 pages

Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural se

BelongingCultural IdentitySurvival StoryOcean and Ships
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Gods and Warriors

Michelle Paver

Survival StoryOcean and ShipsMiddle GradeAdventure
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Dick Sands the Boy Captain

Jules Verne

On the 2nd of February, 1873, the "Pilgrim," a tight little craft of 400 tons burden, lay in lat. 43° 57’, S. and long. 165° 19’, W. She was a schooner, the property of James W. Weldon, a wealthy Californian ship-owner who had fitted her out at San Francisco, expressly for the whale-fisheries in the southern seas.

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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Stowaway

Karen Hesse · 320 pages

Ocean and ShipsMiddle GradeTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell · 479 pages

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, decei

JapanCultural IdentityOcean and ShipsHistorical Fiction
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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

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryMiddle GradeAdventure
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Elephant Run

Roland Smith · 336 pages

Survival StoryMiddle GradeTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 475 pages

*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un

BelongingCultural IdentitySurvival StoryHistorical Fiction
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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

JapanBelongingCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryMiddle GradeTeen Protagonist
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Black Duck

Janet Taylor Lisle · 252 pages

Years afterwards, Ruben Hart tells the story of how, in 1929 Newport, Rhode Island, his family and his best friend's family were caught up in the violent competition among groups trying to control the local rum-smuggling trade.

Ocean and ShipsMiddle GradeTeen ProtagonistAdventure
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The Cay

Theodore Taylor · 144 pages

Book Description: Read Theodore Taylor’s classic bestseller and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner The Cay. Phillip is excited when the Germans invade the small island of Curaçao. War has always been a game to him, and he’s eager to glimpse it firsthand–until the freighter he and his mother are traveling to the United States on is torpedoed. When Phillip comes to, he is on a small raft in

Ocean and ShipsSurvival StoryMiddle GradeAdventure

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