Norwich Tech Summer Reading
Grades 9-12: Assignment and Reading Recommendations
Fiction Book Recommendations
After the Shot Drops
by Randy Ribay
Bunny and Nasir have been best friends since they were little, however that friendship is tested when Bunny gets an athletic scholarship at a prestigious school across town. While Bunny tries to fit in with his new peers, Nasir begins to spend more time with his cousin Wallice who is being evicted. Told in alternating voices, After the Shot Drops is a powerful story about friendship, basketball, and one teen's mission to create a better life for his family.
American Road Trip
by Patrick Flores-Scott
Teodoro is in love with his mom’s green chile cheeseburgers and a girl named Wendy Martinez. When his brother, Manny, returns home from Iraq with PTSD, his family, already reeling from the housing bubble, is thrown into survival mode. Teodoro is afraid all of his hard work to prepare for college will be lost. Luckily, his sister has a plan to save them all!
Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree
by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
276 girls were kidnapped from their Nigerian homes, schools, and families on April 14, 2014. This story follows one of these girls as her dreams of any future are torn away, she is forced into a camp to radicalize her beliefs, and watches as the group Boko Harem terrorizes her country.
Check, Please! Book 1: #Hockey
Bitty enters freshman year at Samwell University armed with a love of skating, baking, and a sense of humor—all documented on his vlog—but is he ready to face the challenges of university hockey, hockey bros, and a gorgeously talented captain?
Dread Nation
by Justina Ireland
When the dead rise up from the battlefield during the U.S. Civil War, there is suddenly a new enemy to fight. Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls is one of the best training schools in the country, and Jane McKeene is the top pupil. She could easily find herself working to protect any of the fine women of Baltimore from the shamblers, but when whole families start to go missing, Jane sets out to uncover the secrets and solve the mystery.
The Poet X
by Elizabeth Acevedo
A victim of constant harassment in her city of Harlem by both men and women, the only place Xiomara Batista feels like herself is while writing her poetry and with her new love interest, Aman, both of which she must hide from her intensely catholic mother who is determined to force Xiomara to obey the laws of the church. A novel written in verse, readers explore the inner thoughts of Xiomara, her frustrations that fuel her creativity and the power of the written and spoken word.
The Nowhere Girls
by Amy Reed
Three new friends decide to seek justice after an assault goes unpunished. They form an anonymous club that encourages a diverse group of girls to rise up and fight the sexist power structure that surrounds them.
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe
by Preston Norton
Cliff Hubbard thinks he has nothing going for him and out of all the people he hates at his school he hates Aaron Zimmerman the most. But Aaron has heard the voice of God and has been commanded to get Cliff’s help at making their school better. What follows is a story that will have you laughing, crying and making you realize that when you label someone, what you see is not exactly what you get.
Long Way Down
by Jason Reynolds
Told in short staccato narrative verse, this takes a look at teenage gun violence. During sixty potent seconds- the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.
Symptoms of Being Human
by Jeff Garvin
As a closeted gender fluid teenager, Riley must struggle with high school, relationships, and discovering what it means to feel comfortable in your own body. On the advice of a therapist, Riley starts an anonymous blog that gains national attention, however just when things are starting to look up someone discovers Riley’s true identity and threatens exposure. Now Riley must decide to speak out and face the world or walk away from the safe space the blog created.
A Heart in a Body in the World
by Deb Caletti
Months after a devastating tragedy, Annabelle starts to run. Down the street. Into the next town. Soon she’s on a 2,700 mile journey from Seattle to Washington DC. With her grandfather following in his RV, and her friends and family supporting her from a distance, Annabelle embarks on a cross country journey of healing.
Scythe
by Neal Shusterman
A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: Humanity has conquered all those things and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life and they are commanded to so in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe- a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequences of failure could mean losing their own.
Nonfiction Book Recommendations
Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam
by Elizabeth Partridge
Personal Stories of eight people: six American soldiers, one American nurse and one Vietnamese refugee. From dense jungles to terrifying firefights to chaotic medic rescues and evacuations, each individual’s story reveals a different facet of the war and moves readers forward in time.
The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees
by Don Brown
Starting in 2011, refugees flood out of war-torn Syria in Exodus- like proportions. The surprising flood of victims overwhelms neighboring countries, and chaos follows. Resentment in host nations heightens as disruption and coast of aid grows. By 2017, many want to turn their backs on the victims. The refugees are the unwanted.
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers
by Deborah Heiligman
The deep and enduring friendship between Vincent and Theo Van Gogh shaped both brothers’ lives. Confidant, champion, sympathizer, friend, Theo supported Vincent as he struggles to find his path in life. They shared everything, swapping stories of friends, successes and disappointments, dreams and ambitions.
March: Book One
by John Lewis,
Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell
March is a vivid first hand account of John Lewis’s lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, mediating in the modern ag on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Roots in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.
March: Book Two
After the success of the Nashville sit-in campaign, John Lewis is more committed than ever to changing the world through nonviolence - but as he and his fellow Freedom Riders board a bus into the vicious heart of the deep south, they will be tested like never before.
Faced with beatings, police brutality, imprisonment, arson, and even murder, the young activists of the movement struggle with internal conflicts as well. But their courage will attract the notice of powerful allies, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Attorney Kennedy... this 23-year-old will be thrust into the national spotlight, becoming one of the "Big Six" leaders of the civil rights movement and a central figure in the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
March: Book Three
With these new struggles come new allies, new opponents, and an unpredictable new president who might be both at once. But fractures within the movement are deepening ... even as 25-year-old John Lewis prepares to risk everything in a historic showdown high above the Alabama river, in a town called Selma.
#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Woman
by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale
This presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews and art that combine to express the experiences of being an Native women. Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book.
The Whydah: A Pirate Ship Feared, Wrecked and Found
by Martin W. Sandler
The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi
by Neal Bascomb
A thrilling spy mission, a moving Holocaust story and a narrative nonfiction story- all in one. In 1945, at the end of WWII, Adolf Eichmann, the head of operation sfo the Nazis’ Final Solution, walked into the mountains of Germany and vanished from view. Sixteen years later, an elite team of spies captured him at a bus stop in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel, regulating in on e forte century’ most important trials: one that cemented the Holocaust in the public imagination.
Where can I get fiction and nonfiction books to read?
Your local library: print books and online books
Bank Square Books (free shipping for Norwich Tech families)
Book images above are linked directly to Bank Square Books
Online: Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, etc
Sora (if you have a Cttech.org email address)