One of the hardest things for children to develop in history is a sense of period. What was it really like to live in a Stone Age house for example, to get up every morning knowing if you didn’t collect food or hunt something then there would be nothing to eat, or if you didn’t collect enough fuel for the fire there would be no heating or cooking. Archaeological remains can begin to give us some of the answers, but sometimes we need to go beyond the evidence and try to tell the story in other ways. Historical fiction, if it is well grounded in research and evidence, can help us to fill in some of the gaps...