Summer Reading
9th grade Reccomendations
The Graveyard Book By Neil Gaiman
The orphan Bod, short for Nobody, is taken in by the inhabitants of a graveyard as a child of eighteen months and raised lovingly and carefully to the age of eighteen years by the community of ghosts and otherworldly creatures. #EnglishClass #Courage #Fantasy #Horror
Find it on Amazon or at the Trenton Veterans Memorial Library
19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Nye
A collection of sixty poems in which the Arab-American author examines life in the Middle East. #Poetry #WorldHistory #EnglishClass #WorldView
Find it on Amazon or at the Trenton Veterans Memorial Library
Heart of a Samurai: Based on the True Story of Nakahama by Margi Preus
In 1841, rescued by an American whaler after a terrible shipwreck leaves him and his four companions castaways on a remote island, fourteen-year-old Manjiro, who dreams of becoming a samurai, learns new laws and customs as he becomes the first Japanese person to set foot in the United States. #Fiction #WorldHistory #EnglishClass #AsianAmerican
Find it on Amazon or at the Trenton Veterans Memorial Library
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Thirteen-year-old Conor awakens one night to find a monster outside his bedroom window, but not the one from the recurring nightmare that began when his mother became ill--an ancient, wild creature that wants him to face truth and loss. #Fantasy #EnglishClass #HealthClass #Cancer #Death&Dying
Tamar by Mal Peet
In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family. #HistoricalFiction #WorldHistory #EnglishClass #WWII
Newt's Emerald by Garth Nix
After the Newington Emerald is stolen at the height of a conjured storm, eighteen-year-old Lady Truthful Newington goes to London, disguised as a man, to search for the magical heirloom of her house, and is soon caught up in a dangerous adventure where she must risk her life, her reputation, and her heart. #Fantasy #Royalty #Realms #Magic #Romance
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten
Adam not only is trying to understand his OCD, while trying to balance his relationship with his divorced parents, but he's also trying to navigate through the issues that teenagers normally face, namely the perils of young love #RealisticFiction #OCD #Dating
The Walls Around Us by Nova Ten Suma
Orianna and Violet are ballet dancers and best friends, but when the ballerinas who have been harassing Violet are murdered, Orianna is accused of the crime and sent to a juvenile detention center where she meets Amber and they experience supernatural events linking the girls together. #Paranormal #Ballet #Prison #Friends
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde, having witnessed paparazzo-turned-EMT Jeevan Chaudhary try to save the life of actor Arthur Leander after he suffered a heart attack on stage, travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community in which a prophet will not let anyone leave alive. Includes subplots about Jeevan as he watches the world change from the pandemic and Arthur before his death. #ScienceFiction #Shakespear #Survival #Disease
Descent by Tim Johnston
A family is undone by the disappearance of their eighteen-year-old daughter who went out for a morning run and didn't come back. Her vanishing--on a sunny, late-summer vacation morning--is the beginning the family's harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths. #Thriller #Mountains #Disapearance #Suspense
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Presented an offer too lucrative to refuse, gang leader Kaz Brekker and his team of convicts, runaways, and thieves set out to smuggle an imprisoned scientist from an impenetrable Fjerdan fortress, only to face treachery and betrayal along the way. #Robbers #Outlaws #Magic #Fantasy #Thriller
Audacity by Melanie Crowder
This novel-in-verse fictionalizes the teen years of Clara Lemlich Shavelson, the leader of the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909. Fleeing from anti-Semitic Russia, the teen and her family struggle to adapt to their new home. #HistoricalFiction #Poetry #Immigrants #Factories
The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen
When a school bus accident leaves sixteen-year-old Jessica an amputee, she returns to school with a prosthetic limb and her track team finds a wonderful way to help rekindle her dream of running again. #RealisticFiction #EnglishClass #Track #Running #Disabilities
Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by Greg Neri
A brief biography, in graphic novel format, of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, an eleven-year old African American gang member from Chicago who went on the run after shooting a young girl and was later found dead, shot by members of his own gang. #Nonfiction #GraphicNovel #EnglishClass #GunViolence #HealthClass
Turnabout by Margaret Haddix
Melly and Anny Beth participate in a top-secret experiment that makes them grow younger. #ScienceFiction #Ageing #TimeTravel
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note. #WorldHistory #EnglishClass #Holocaust #Survival #HistoricalFiction