Whether it’s via their tone, topic, or tenor, certain works just say “America.” Here is one such title, suggested by Liz Robelen, a longtime review editor at the Independent who once had the privilege of teaching history at Edmund Burke School in Washington, DC:

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. “This is a fictional, first-person account of a young African American writer dragged by an unknown power back and forth in time between her Los Angeles life in 1976 and that of her Black ancestor on a plantation in pre-Civil War Maryland,” says Robelen. “While the time-travel element is the author’s invention, Butler modeled the bleak plantation experience on authentic slave narratives, many of which were collected during the Depression by the Federal Writers Project under the Works Project Administration of the New Deal.”

Each year, the Grateful American™ Foundation, through its Book Prize, honors excellence in children’s historical nonfiction and fiction focused on the people and events that have shaped the U.S. since its birth. Learn more about the prize here.

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