Locate the grade level you will be entering in August of 2010 and choose
one of these books for your summer reading pleasure.
Locate the grade level you will be entering in August of 2010 and choose one of these books for your summer reading pleasure. |
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| 9th Grade | |
| SLEEPING FRESHMEN NEVER LIE by David Lubar: Starting high school is never easy. Seniors take your lunch money. Girls you’ve known forever are suddenly beautiful and unattainable. And you can never get enough sleep. Could there be a worse time for Scotts mother to announce she’s pregnant? Scott decides high school would be a lot less overwhelming if it came with a survival manual, so he begins to write down tips for his new sibling. Scott records his first year of bullies, romance, honors, classes, and brotherhood. |
| 10th GRADE | |
| LAST DAYS OF SUMMER by Steve Kluger This is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third baseman for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs. |
| UGLIES by Scott Westerfield: In this futuristic society young people believe they're ugly until age 16. They undergo an operation that changes them into the "pretties." Tally, turning 16, meets Shay who questions the current way of life. When her friend, Shay, disappears, Tally is coerced by cruel Dr. Cable to betray her friend by revealing her whereabouts or stay "ugly" forever. |
| THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS by John Boyne: This story is told from the viewpoint of an innocent child whose family moves from their luxurious home in Berlin to a strange new part of the country where Bruno's father is commandant of a concentration camp. Bruno makes friends with a young boy from Krakow who lives "on the other side of the fence." As the story build to a horrifying climax, the innocent's experience brings home the unimaginable horror. |
| 11th GRADE | |
| RUNNER by Carl Deuker: Chance Taylor's father, a Gulf War Veteran and alcoholic, is fired from his job. Chance worries about where they will get the money to pay the mortgage for the run-down sailboat they call home. Running along the Seattle waterfront is an escape from all of his problems. When a marina employee offers to pay him $250 a week to pick up packages, Chance finds himself in danger and gets a glimpse of the heroic man his father once was. |
| BOOT CAMP by Todd Strasser In the middle of the night Garrett is taken from his home to Harmony Lake, a boot camp for troubled teens. Maybe some kids deserve to be sent there, but Garrett knows he doesn't. Subjected to brutal physical and psychological abuse, he tries to fight back, but the battle is futile. He won't be allowed to leave until he's admitted his "mistakes" and conformed to Harmony Lake's standards of behavior. And there's no way to fake it. Beaten, humiliated, and stripped of his pride, Garrett's spirit is slowly ebbing away. Then he hears whispers of an escape plot. It's incredibly risky -- if he's caught, the consequences will be unthinkable -- but it may be his only way out. |
| JUST LISTEN by Sara Dessen: Annabel Greene seems to have it all, but that is not the case. At school, she is shunned because she's hiding secrets about an end of the year party. At home, she's hiding secrets about her sister's anorexia. Her life is changed when she meets Owen Armstrong, the school's loner who is obsessed with music and telling the truth. |
| 12th GRADE | |
| BLACK AND WHITE by Paul Volponi: Two Island City High School basketball stars known as "Black and White" turn to robbery to get easy money for shoes and seniors fees. When the gun goes off during a robbery, Marcus and Eddie tell in alternating chapters what happens to them in the aftermath. Their friendship is challenged as they experience the justice system differently because of race. |
| In Chicago on a cold December afternoon in 1958, Our Lady of the Angels School burned ferociously. Within minutes, 92 students and 3 nuns perished. The number of children they found burned or asphyxiated in their second floor classrooms horrified even seasoned firefighters. As a result of this disaster, fire codes across the country were revised to save lives. This is a riveting chronicle of the fire and its aftermath as survivors dealt with physical and emotional scars. |
| THE LAST LECTURE by Randy Pausch When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. |