Summer+Reading+Assignments

All required summer assignments will be listed here. Summer assignments will be due on the first day of school regardless of the semester you are enrolled in the class. Contact the guidance office at (410) 885-2077 or e-mail the appropriate teacher if you have any questions. =English 9= Reader Response Log (Only for Regular English 9) See Bottom of page for book ideas =Honors English 9=

=Honors English 10= =Honors English 11=

=Honors English 12=

=AP English 11=

=AP English 12=



=Honors Government=

=AP Psychology=

=AP U.S. History=



=AP Chemistry=

=Need Help Choosing a Book?=

Books for Reluctant Readers from: []

//****Pop****// by Gordon Korman **Lexile: 740** A fictional book aimed at sports-playing boys, //Pop// is so good even my reluctant readers like it! It is an easy go-to for middle school and upper elementary boys.

//** Chains **// by Laurie Halse Anderson **Lexile: 780** This is historical fiction that will not bore your kiddos and is even good for adult readers. This is the same author that wrote //Twisted//. For some reason, my boys like it more than my girls even though it is told from a female character’s perspective. Social Studies teachers love me for this one!

//** Million Dollar Throw **// by Mike Lupica **Lexile: 960** This is another great novel for reluctant boy readers who love sports and an easy one to keep in the library–if you can actually keep it on the shelf.

//** Unwind **// by Neil Shusterman **Lexile: 740** Wow! //Unwind// is a great thriller that keeps you until the very end…boys and girls love it. It is so great to see the kids find out what “unwind” means – they come running to my desk to tell me, and every time I act like I had no idea. =)

**//Because I am Furniture//** by Thalia Chatas **Lexile: 990** This book appeals to girls who love verse. It is very, very popular. My copy is literally in shreds; it's being held together with tape at this point.

//** The Hunger Games Trilogy **// by Suzanne Collins **Lexile: 810** //Hunger Games// is a science fiction thriller that both my guys and girls love. Once they read the first, they reserve the next! This one has not made it to my shelf all year…it just gets passed around.

//****Boost****// by Kathy Mackel **Lexile: 600** My athletic girls love this book. They in turn share it with my basketball boys. I like the fact that it is told from the perspective of a female athlete.

** //Life on the Refrigerator Door// ** by Alice Kuipers **Lexile: 530** This book is another that never stayed on my shelf. It is aimed at girls and is a super-quick read with a sad punch at the end. Most of my girls gobble it up in a day or two.

//** Twisted **// by Laurie Halse Anderson **Lexile: 680** A darker story that tends to be popular with the boys it is definitely a higher level read and deals with mature themes. I enjoyed it as well.

//** Gym Candy **// by Carl Dueker **Lexile: 710** My boys ate this sports theme book up and then passed it on to my "sporty" girls who kept it out of circulation for weeks!

//The Compound// is a thriller for guys and girls... just watch their faces! You'll know when they get to the part about the milk. HA!
 * // The Compound //** by S.A. Bodeen **Lexile: 570**

This is another verse-written book that your girls will fight over. There are a few other verse books written by this same author that all deliver for your girls.
 * // Chasing Brooklyn //** by Lisa Schroeder **Lexile: 510**

=100 Books Every High School Student Should Read= 100 Books

= = = = = Staff Picks = = =
 * 1) ** [|Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien] **: WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewelry was a "masterpiece". **Lexile: 810-920**
 * 2) ** [|To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee] **: A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and weird neighbours in Thirties Alabama. **Lexile: 870**
 * 3) ** [|The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore] **: A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
 * 4) ** [|The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams] **: Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
 * 5) ** [|One Thousand and One Nights Anon] **: A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
 * 6) ** [|The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe] **: Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
 * 7) ** [|Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie] **: The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth. **Lexile: 1120**
 * 8) ** [|Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre] **: Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
 * 9) ** [|Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons] **: Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. "Something nasty" has been observed in the woodshed.
 * 10) ** [|The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki] **: The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And possibly the world’s first novel? **:exile: 1190**
 * 11) ** [|Under the Net by Iris Murdoch] **: A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
 * 12) ** [|The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing] **: Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls "inner space fiction."
 * 13) ** [|Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin] **: Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love. **Lexile: 1220**
 * 14) ** [|On the Road by Jack Kerouac] **: Beat generation boys aim to "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." **Lexile: 930**
 * 15) ** [|Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac] **: A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero "Rastingnac" became a byword for ruthless social climbing. **Lexile:1180**
 * 16) ** [|The Red and the Black by Stendhal] **: Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his "force diame." **Lexile: 1080**
 * 17) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas] **: "One for all and all for one:" the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady. **Lexile: 960**
 * 18) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Germinal by Emile Zola] **: Written to "germinate" social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
 * 19) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Stranger by Albert Camus] **: Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts "the gentle indifference of the world." **Lexile: 880**
 * 20) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco] **: Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastery.
 * 21) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey] **: An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km. **Lexile: 1020**
 * 22) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys] **: Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
 * 23) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll] **: Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast. **Lexile: 940**
 * 24) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Catch-22 by Joseph Heller] **: Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy? **Lexile: 1140**
 * 25) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Trial by Franz Kafka] **: K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But "innocent of what?" **Lexile: 1150**
 * 26) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee] **: Protagonist’s "first long secret drink of golden fire" is under a hay wagon.
 * 27) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan] **: Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist. **Lexile: 810**
 * 28) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque] **: The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier. **Lexile: 830**
 * 29) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler] **: Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation. **Lexile: 720**
 * 30) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin] **: Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
 * 31) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa] **: Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the "jackals" ousting the nobility, or "leopards." **Lexile: 1160**
 * 32) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino] **: International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
 * 33) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Crash by JG Ballard] **: Former TV scientist preaches "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology."
 * 34) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul] **: East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds "The world is what it is."
 * 35) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky] **: Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
 * 36) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak] **: Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution. **Lexile: 1010**
 * 37) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz] **: Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
 * 38) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson] **: This famous novella has been adapted for movies, opera and plays.
 * 39) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift] **: Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s). **Lexile: 1210**
 * 40) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk] **: A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
 * 41) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez] **: Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
 * 42) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|London Fields by Martin Amis] **: A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
 * 43) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaoo] **: Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
 * 44) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse] **: Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
 * 45) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Tin Drum by Gnter Grass] **: Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
 * 46) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Austerlitz by WG Sebald] **: Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
 * 47) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov] **: Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent "nymphet" is complicated by her mother’s passion for him. **Lexile: 1380**
 * 48) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood] **: After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding. **Lexile: 750**
 * 49) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger] **: Expelled from a "phony" prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase. **Lexile: 790**
 * 50) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Underworld by Don DeLillo] **: From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
 * 51) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Beloved by Toni Morrison] **: Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery. **Lexile: 870**
 * 52) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck] **: "Okies" set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
 * 53) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin] **: Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community. **Lexile: 1030**
 * 54) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera] **: A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
 * 55) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark] **: A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun. **Lexile: 1120**
 * 56) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet] **: Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach? If so, who heard?
 * 57) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre] **: A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
 * 58) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Rabbit books by John Updike] **: A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
 * 59) <span style="font-family: adelle,serif;">** [|The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain] **: A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum "sivilisation." **Lexile: 990**
 * 60) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle] **: A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
 * 61) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton] **: Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue. ** Lexile: 1230 **
 * 62) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe] **: A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival. ** Lexile: 890 **
 * 63) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald] **: A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with "a voice full of money" gets him in trouble. ** Lexile: 1070 **
 * 64) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Warden by Anthony Trollope] **: "Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money," said WH Auden. ** Lexile: 1180 **
 * 65) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Les Miserables by Victor Hugo] **: An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly. ** Lexile: 990 **
 * 66) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis] **: An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl. ** Lexile: 930 **
 * 67) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler] **: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" in this hardboiled crime noir. ** Lexile: 660 **
 * 68) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Clarissa by Samuel Richardson] **: Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
 * 69) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell] **: Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears "the wrong kind of overcoat."
 * 70) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky] **: Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
 * 71) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Atonement by Ian McEwan] **: Puts the "c" word in the classic English country house novel.
 * 72) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec] **: The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
 * 73) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Tom Jones by Henry Fielding] **: Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door. ** Lexile: 1360 **
 * 74) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Frankenstein by Mary Shelley] **: Human endeavours "to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" have tragic consequences. ** Lexile: 1170 **
 * 75) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell] **: Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution. ** Lexile: 1220 **
 * 76) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins] **: Hailed by TS Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels." ** Lexile: 1040 **
 * 77) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Ulysses by James Joyce] **: Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest "sentences" in English literature: 4,391 words.
 * 78) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert] **: Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end. ** Lexile: 1030 **
 * 79) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|A Passage to India by EM Forster] **: A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India. ** Lexile: 950 **
 * 80) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|1984 by George Orwell] **: In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired. ** Lexile: 1090 **
 * 81) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne] **: Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
 * 82) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The War of the Worlds by HG Wells] **: Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles. ** Lexile: 1170 **
 * 83) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Scoop by Evelyn Waugh] **: Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes. ** Lexile: 830 **
 * 84) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy] **: Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy. ** Lexile: 1160 **
 * 85) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Brighton Rock by Graham Greene] **: A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s novel. ** Lexile: 680 **
 * 86) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse] **: A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s gentleman.
 * 87) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte] **: Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s "souls." Then he leaves. ** Lexile: 880 **
 * 88) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|David Copperfield by Charles Dickens] **: Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows. ** Lexile:1070 **
 * 89) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe] **: A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island. ** Lexile: 1320 **
 * 90) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen] **: Every proud posh boy deserves a bratty, prejudiced girl. ** Lexile: 1370 **
 * 91) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes] **: Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills. ** Lexile: 1480 **
 * 92) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf] **: Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party. ** Lexile: 940 **
 * 93) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Disgrace by JM Coetzee] **: An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
 * 94) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte] **: Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr. Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally. ** Lexile: 890 **
 * 95) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust] **: Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
 * 96) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad] **: "The conquest of the earth," said Conrad, "is not a pretty thing." ** Lexile: 1020 **
 * 97) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James] **: An American heiress in Europe "affronts her destiny" by marrying an adulterous egoist. ** Lexile: 1020 **
 * 98) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy] **: Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of "a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow." ** Lexile: 1080 **
 * 99) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Moby Dick by Herman Melville] **: Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale that ate his leg. ** Lexile; 1200 **
 * 100) <span style="color: #666666; font-family: adelle,serif; font-size: 15px;">** [|Middlemarch by George Eliot] **: "One of the few English novels written for grown-up people," said Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Pantalone

 * "Out of My Mind"** by Sharon Draper: If you are a teacher - read it! If you want to teach special needs - read it! If you want to read a great book about students and how they interact with each other and special needs students - read it! Melody has cerebral palsy. She can't talk, but she is very smart. There is a Whiz Kidz competition and Melody knows all of the answers, yet she can't communicate the answers to anyone. Her parents and teachers were her greatest supporters. Then one day her teacher discovered that Melody needed something more than flashcards to communicate, and it was a miracle from there. This book will change how you view and respond to people of all abilities. * P.S. Any book by Sharon Draper is an amazing read.
 * "Bystander"** by James Preller: Eric's parents broke up and they move to New York. Eric befriends a group of bullies (without realizing it). He finds out very quickly who his real friends are.
 * "All Unquiet Things"** by Anna Jarzab - Good read. Carly lives in a rich neighborhood and is found dead, by her ex-boyfriend, Neily. Her drunk uncle is accused of the murder. Her cousin, Audrey, who is also the drunk uncle's daughter, doesn't believe that her father killed Carly. There was no motive, or was there? Carly's ex-boyfriend, Neily, is trying to get over the loss of Carly, yet Audrey won't let him. Together, they uncover the mystery around Carly's death.
 * "The Girl Who Played with Fire"** by Stieg Larsson - This book is definitely for a more adult audience. Outstanding intrigue and fast paced read. There are a lot of characters, however, the author tends to reiterate the story so much that you can't help but know all of the characters intimately.
 * "Jump"** by Celisa Carbone - Super fast read. The writer's style is very simple to read and follow. Each main character, P.K. and Critter, have their own paragraph and monologue going on. It's an interesting style of writing. The story is about two teenagers who are misunderstood by their parents. They run away to "do their own thing". However, they never knew each other before each of them ran away from a totally different situation. Critter has an interesting outlook on life and P.K. understands him. Together they go on a great "adventure". Make your parents read this book too!
 * "Split"** by Swati Avasthi - Very sad book about spousal abuse that turns towards the children. Two brothers try to protect their mother from being abused by their father. The older brother leaves the family after being beat brutally by his father. The younger brother, during a confrontation with his father, punches the father in retaliation. Broken and bruised, the younger brother seeks out his older brother. Together they try to rescue their mother from her abusive situation. After many arguments, lies, and tears, the brothers try to work together to figure their own lives out. Will they ever be able to bring back "normalcy" into their lives?
 * "The Art of Racing in The Rain"** by Garth Stein - This book was told by the owner's dog, Enzo. Right off the bat you think, dog book, sad, well it is true. It was very funny at points, but the story was sad. The title is a very big message about how you should live your life. I would definitely read another book by this author.
 * "The Rock and The River"** by Kekla Magoon. Great book about the civil rights movement. Sam and his brother Steven are caught in the middle of what their father is preaching, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., and what they believe should be done during the civil rights movement. As young boys, they have very difficult decisions to make as to what road to take in the midst of all of this turmoil. Are you the rock or the river?
 * "Girl, Stolen"** by April Henry. Excellent book. Quick read. You want to find out what happens to Cheyenne, who has been kidnapped by a young man who doesn't realize she is in the back seat of her step-mom's SUV. She is blind, but uses her other senses to try to get out of trouble. However, the kidnappers dad realizes that Cheyenne is the daughter of the president of Nike. Now he wants money.
 * "A Kiss In Time"** by Alex Flinn. Have you heard of "Sleeping Beauty"? This book is a mix between the fairy tail and the 21st century. Jack is bored on his European vacation so he and his buddy wander off through a thicket only to discover a delapidated castle. As they explore, they see that everyone is asleep, especially an extremely beautiful girl. Travis talks Jack into kissing this girl, and she wakes upon his kiss. She is very bossy and as Jack calls her, a brat. Talia (the princess) realizes that her kingdom has been asleep for 300 years all because of her carelessness. Her father is furious, there is no food, people are waking up, and the crops are destroyed. Talia and Jack run away to Miami. Watch how they cope in the 21st century as well as the 1700s. Alex Flinn also wrote "Beastly" which I heard was very good. It is based on "Beauty and the Beast". Enjoy.