Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources FICTION books for teens about underwritten history

I'm interested in fiction that's appropriate for teens, about any of the following:
Woodstock
Flappers in the 20's
Korean War
the Jazz Age
McCarthyism/the red scare

And yes, I already know about and want to read The Great Gatsby.

What a great interest in U.S. history of the 1900's! The past century has seen powerful events.

Here are a few thoughts:

1) Not FICTION, but may be of interest:
This Fabulous Century by Time/Life books

2) Novel about three doctors during the Korean War:
MASH, which was the basis for the long-running TV series M*A*S*H.

3) Historial fiction in the Jazz era:
Bud, Not Buddy.

4) If you become a fan of "The Great Gatsby", there is an adorable miniature keepsake edition, made by miniboox, Miniaturbuchverlag Leipzig located in Simbach, Germany.

5) Fortunately a lot has been learned from Woodstock so that concerts are planned differently. Unfortunately, Woodstock may sometimes be romanticized or idealized, but some say it was both a financial ruin and a public health hazard. Woodstock is the misnomer of the outdoor music festival held some 70 miles away from Woodstock, NY in White Lake (Bethel, NY) on the dairy farm of Max Yasgur. This discrepancy between the festival name and location is because several of the landowners who were originally contacted did not want to rent their fields for the concert, and with good reason: there was logistically not enough infrastructure, food, water, shelter, sanitation, etc for the type of event planned. There are youtube videos with actual footage and news coverage. A book which may be of interest is Are You Experienced? by J Sonnenblick. (Attempts to add links to the amazon webpage and the author's website were unsuccessful as these were caught in the forum's SPAM filter, possibly due to the author's first name. I mention this because interested readers may wish to look up the author's website and amazon webpage, although they are not linked here, and view the book's synopsis and comments.)

I'll update this later if more titles come to mind.

Thanks! Wow, Mash was a book first? I've heard great things about the show--this is awesome news!

My favourite books about the era in Britain are Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

Thanks. I've heard of those, I think. I'll have to look into them.
@indigo, I see you edited your post. I've read Bud Not Buddy twice and enjoyed it both times. Good choice.

The Dorothy Sayers books are wonderful, and I especially like the Lord Peter / Harriet Vane ones. I would recommend that you start with Strong Poison. The next ones in line after that are Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night (my favorite), and Busman's Honeymoon. (There are a couple more written by Jill Paton Walsh in the last few years that are OK, but not nearly as good as Sayers'.) One that does not have Harriet in it but that I particularly like is Murder Must Advertise. But really, you can't go wrong with any of her books.

Second all the Harriet Vane recommendations, though personally I'd start with the very first book in the series, Whose body?, and go on with Clouds of Withess and then The unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, all of which poke gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) fun on the era.

Thank you.

I looked them up and they're mysteries, which aren't my favorites, but I'll consider them anyway.

I ran across this When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park while browsing for books for DD recently. Fiction about a family in Korea in WWII. Haven't read it yet.

It's a short story, but "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" by Fitzgerald is my favorite.

There's so much red scare stuff, but so much of it is veiled. What about Barbara Kingsolvers' The Lacuna? Lillian Helman's Scoundrel Time is a memoir, and not a great one, but there's a lot of good HUAC stuff in there.

Comfort Woman is WW II refugee story by Nora Ojka Keller. It is amazing. She also has Fox Girl (Korean War). Both of those books directly address sexual violence and the experience of Korean women post war, so they may be too much.

Sinclair Lewis has Babbit (20s).

John Okada's No-No Boy, about the experience of WWII era Japanese-Americans in internment camps who answered "no" to military enlistment and a loyalty oath.

Snow Falling On Cedars (David Guterson) is another novel that weaves WWII Japanese-American internment and post-war sequelae into the narrative.

German Boy - Wolfgang Samuel

Usually history is written by the winners - this account is interesting because it describes the events seen through the eyes of a young boy on the losing side at the closing stages of WWII and its harrowing aftermath.

Try them out. In most of them, the mystery does not have to get in the way of what can also be read as a comedy of manners. They are not equally good, which is why we made recommendations. Gaudy night, in particular, can also be read as a thoughtful novel about gender equality in 1930s Oxford university. No one even gets killed in that one! But it is hard to understand without the back story of Strong Poison.

History.com has created, and recently updated, a segment on Woodstock:
"Woodstock, the Legendary 1969 Festival, Was Also a Miserable Mud Pit"
link - https://www.history.com/news/woodstock-music-festival-conditions-1969

This brief historical sketch offers context to aid a reader's understanding of any fiction one might encounter on the topic.