Teen Military Fiction

Twelve-year-old Samuel Collier is a lowly commoner on the streets of London. So when he becomes the page of Captain John Smith and boards the Susan Constant, bound for the New World, he can’t believe his good fortune. He’s heard that gold washes ashore with every tide. But beginning with the stormy journey and his first contact with the native people, he realizes that the New World is nothing like he imagined. The lush Virginia shore where they establish the colony of James Town is both beautiful and forbidding, and it’s hard to know who’s a friend or foe.

Minor viruses are eating away at the Net Force computers. The email shut-downs and flickering monitors are hardly emergencies - but they've been keeping the tech department hopping. Same with the sudden rash of time-consuming lawsuits. No one in the Net Force has a moment to spare, which is exactly the way Mitchell Townsend Ames wants it. Because when the shadowy mastermind launches his master plan, he wants Net Force to be looking the other way....

On a hot summer afternoon in 1944, SS troops wiped out an entire French village. 644 men, women and children died that day. Just one child survived. This book tells the story of what happened in Oradour, and imagines what drove both the SS officer who ordered the massacre, and the seven-year-old boy who escaped it. Powerful, moving and almost unbearably tense, this book weaves the truth about what happened to the people in Oradour into a powerful fictional story centred on two characters: the plucky, inspirational seven-year-old Alfred Fournier, refugee and resident of Oradour, and the hot-headed, power-hungry SS commander who shattered his world and changed his life for ever, Major Gustav Dietrich. As their two worlds collide, we gain a fascinating insight into the extremes and contradictions of human behaviour and emotion. With a twist in the tale, this is a story which leaves the reader surprised, inspired and profoundly moved.

A toy soldier. A butter dish. A compass. Mundane objects, perhaps, but to the remarkable authors in this collection, artifacts such as these have inspired stories that go to the heart of the human experience of World War I. Each author was invited to choose an object that had a connection to the war - a writing kit for David Almond, a helmet for Michael Morpurgo - and use it as the inspiration for an original short story.

When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother's stolen his girlfriend and car, and the nightmares of his best friend getting killed keep him completely spooked. But when he runs into Harper, a girl who despises him for rumors Travis started back in middle school, life actually starts looking up. And as he and Harper see more of each other, he falls deeper in love with her and begins to find his way through the family meltdown and the post-traumatic stress.

Carl Lavin was a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Canton, Ohio, native enlisted when he turned 18, a decision that would take him with the US Army from training across the United States and Britain to combat with the 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. Home Front to Battlefront is the tale of a foot soldier who finds himself thrust into a world where he and his unit grapple with the horrors of combat, the idiocies of bureaucracy, and the oddities of life back home - all in the same day.

In 1861, 16-year-old Joe Roberts leads a mundane life as far as he's concerned. His world spins in the same circle each day: working at his family's store, taking his sisters on boyish escapades, and bickering with his rogue of a cousin, Lucas. Joe can't understand why his mother allows Lucas to live and work with them after all the pain he caused their family. When war is declared, Joe is quick to join up and become a soldier with the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers, but war is nothing like he imagined.

Before Pam's father left to fight in World War I, the two of them trained their pigeons to fly home at night, a time when most birds just want to sleep. This interests a stranger with a foreign accent who comes to town and offers to pay a lot of money for Pam's birds. But when Pam refuses to sell and some of her birds are later stolen, she suspects the stranger may be more than a simple bird enthusiast. He may be an enemy spy!

C.S. Forester, creator of the beloved Horatio Hornblower series, takes young readers on an exciting adventure to the shores of Tripoli in North Africa. That's where, more than 200 years ago, the United States was threatened by "pirates" who snatched American merchant ships and imprisoned sailors - and the country's young, untested navy took on the task of fighting the pirates in their home waters.

Nonfiction master Russell Freedman illuminates for young readers the complex and rarely discussed subject of World War I. The tangled relationships and alliances of many nations, the introduction of modern weaponry, and top-level military decisions that resulted in thousands upon thousands of casualties all contributed to the “great war”, which people hoped and believed would be the only conflict of its kind.

‘The sky split open. A sky of brilliant yellow light; a world of noise that filled his ears like sand at the seaside, so that afterwards there was only total silence’. But silence brings terror and grief to Sonny’s family as they come to terms with the loss of his mother in a German bombing raid. In a fit of anguish and grief, his father joins the RAF to avenge her death, and Sonny is left alone. As he fights for survival, Sonny embarks on his own dramatic and intensely personal confrontation with the enemy….

Edgar Award-winning author Frances O'Roark Dowell is acclaimed for the rich characterizations in her poignant coming-of-age novels. Drawing on her experience as a colonel's daughter, Dowell delivers an evocative portrait of a 12-year-old girl whose view of life, war, and her dad - Fort Hood's base commander - changes as her corpsman brother sends home haunting images from Vietnam. An eloquent narration captures the emotional intensity of the novel's gripping prose.

On Gabriel's 12th birthday, he gets a new bike - and is so excited that he accidentally rides it right into the path of a car. Fortunately, a Black man named Meriwether pushes him out of the way just in time, and fixes his damaged bike. As a thank you, Gabriel gets him a job at his dad's auto shop. Gabriel's dad hires him with some hesitation, however, anticipating trouble with the other mechanic, who makes no secret of his racist opinions. Gabriel and Meriwether become friends, and Gabriel learns that Meriwether drove a tank in the Army's all-Black 761st Tank Battalion in WWII.

A fast paced, gritty murder mystery through the wilds of territorial New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley with the feel of a Tony Hillerman novel and the complexity of a Ngaio Marsh mystery. Pueblos, Apache, former Mexican citizens and the US Army collide in a tale of greed and murder. A new civil war mystery series by best-selling author Phillip and Jennifer Bryant. Peter Thomas Smith's days on the post of Fort Craig, New Mexico territory, are spent fighting boredom, keeping cool, and giving the spiritual state of the fifth California Mounted Infantry volunteers a ready ear.

Levi Battle's been left behind all his life. His mother could sing like a bird and she flew away like one, too. His father left him with his grandmother so he could work as a traveling salesman - until Levi's grandmother left this world entirely. Now Levi's staying with his Aunt Odella while his father is serving in the US Army. But it's 1945, and the war is nearly over, and Aunt Odella decides it's time for Levi to do some leaving of his own. Before he can blink, Levi finds himself on a train from Chicago to Fayettville, North Carolina.

Sibert Honor author Deborah Hopkinson brings her signature action-packed narrative style to one of the most crucial battles of WWII. The WWII invasion known as D-Day was the largest military endeavor in history. By June 6, 1944, Hitler and his allies had a strong grip on the European continent, where Nazi Germany was engaged in the mass extermination of the Jewish people. The goal of D-Day was the total defeat of Hitler's regime and the defense of free democracies everywhere. Knowing they had to breach the French coast, the US, Great Britain, and Canada planned for the impossible.

A heartwarming story of a stray dog and a US marine who met under the unlikeliest circumstances in Afghanistan - and who changed each other's lives forever.

In a ruined world, choices are a thing of the past. What happens when a Creation seizes hers anyway? Nearly a century ago, an extraterrestrial attack destroyed the majority of the world and decimated humanity. In a time of war, protection is needed. Designed to fight for their country, twins Kylie and Luke Alexander are Second Generation Creations, emotionless genetically altered fighters. They have one mission. Fight and live to fight again. But these twins are hiding impossible feelings and deadly secrets.

As the Civil War rages, 15-year-old Thomas Beck longs to fight for his country. He's underage, but his brother, Robert, claims there's another reason he can't fight: There's no such thing as a Chinese Yankee. Assumed a slave because of his odd appearance - including his traditional Chinese queue (long braid) - Thomas soon discovers that giving battle with his regiment isn't enough to shed the Chinese label from his Yankee status.

No one in the galaxy gives a damn about Kheris, a war-torn mining colony in the Between. Thirteen-year-old Luka is used to running from trouble, living rough with a gang of street kids, stealing from the Imperial troops and selling scavenged tech and intel to the Wintran-backed resistance fighters to survive. But when a mysterious ship crashes in the desert, his life is turned upside down overnight. Suddenly Kheris is on everyone’s radar, and he finds himself caught between the two warring factions.