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Who needs to look further than history to find exciting stories of heroes and heroines from all over the globe? Based on real events or on real people in history, historical fiction offers the best of both worlds if you write it well: exciting stories and stealthy learning. You can create great historical fiction as picture books, chapter books, middle-grade books, YA novels, and graphic novels.

My America (Scholastic), written by a variety of authors, is a successful middle-grade series in this category; see also Lyddie, by Katherine Patterson (Puffin Books). YA has seen an explosion of writing in this genre, including A Great and Terrible Beauty (Ember) and The Diviners (Little, Brown), both by Libba Bray. For more YA historical fiction, consider We Are Not Free, by Traci Chee (Clarion Books); These Violent Delights, by Chloe Gong (Margaret K. McElderry Books); and The Enigma Game, by Elizabeth Wein (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Teachers, librarians, parents, and children clamor for the subject matter that these well-written books cover.

Historical fiction provides the perfect genre for writing about real people that the school history books tend to overlook, such as British-Jamaican nurse and businesswoman Mary Seacole (see Figure 3-4). Historical fiction can involve presenting real characters not commonly known because of issues of race or gender, looking at the past through a new lens of diversity, or refashioning issues currently in the cultural spotlight.

Mary Seacole: Bound for the Battlefield. Text copyright © 2020 by Susan Goldman Rubin. Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Richie Pope. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

FIGURE 3-4: Mary Seacole: Bound for the Battlefield, an example of historical fiction.

To write good historical fiction, keep in mind that the time and place provide the setting for the story, but the plot and characters are still the most important elements. Don’t let the setting or time period take center stage. And remember that the characters live in the time in which the story is set, so they don’t remark on how different the setting is from our time period or even notice what we’d consider strange or different.