Summer Reading Assignment 2017 Academic and Honors English IV

This year we will be trying something new! We are asking you to choose any tex t that fascinates, motivates, or rejuvenates you after a long school year. Studying automotive at VoTech? Pick up an automotive manual. Fascinated by zoology? Find a piece that discusses rare animals.

We encourage you to challenge yourself, but above all-- to enjoy the process of reading.

Overwhelmed by all this choice? See the following pages for some of our favorites!

Summer Reading Writing Assignment

Due Friday, September 8th, 2017, this paper will serve as a primary grade and as a writing sample for your pre-assessment. We encourage you to present your teacher with this sample of your best formal writing. (Avoid first-person or colloquial language.)

Read any text (can be fiction or nonfiction) that is at your reading level and write a paper on it. The paper is a reflection essa y on the book that you chose. Your paper is required to be 500 words, double spaced, with full MLA 8 formatting. Resources on how to properly cite in MLA 8 are available on the Kingsway Library/ Media Center website at http://www.krsd.org/Page/1363

Questions to consider when constructing your reflection essay :

● Is the book an enjoyable read? Please explain. ● If the book was written in a different era, is it still relevant today? ● Are the characters memorable? Please explain how and why? ● Is this a book that readers would recommend to a friend? Why or why not? ● Does the book’s content inform the reader about a topic , or is it simply an enjoyable read?

Explain.

Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Summary : Married off by her father, illegitimate 15-year-old Mariam finds herself in Kabul, Afghanistan confined, childless, and beaten by a spiteful husband. Years later he takes a second young bride, Laila, who endures his brutality and produces a son. "Every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief," Laila reflects, which sets the tone for this grueling story of enduring love. Laila and Mariam overcome differences to nurture the book's shards of hope against the selfish rules of men.

Pages: 432 Lexile Level: 830 ISBN: 13: 9781594483851

Title: The Great Train Robbery

Author : Michael Crichton

Summary: In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side, Edward Pierce charms the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of the century. Who would suspect that the gentleman of breeding could mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who could predict the consequences of making the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England’s industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive?

Pages: 304 Lexile Level: 1060 ISBN: 13: 978-0061706493

Title: Jane Eyre

Author: Charlotte Bronte

Summary: Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than Victorian society traditionally allowed. With the heroine full of yearning, the dangerous secrets she encounters, and the choices she finally makes, Charlotte Bronte’s innovative and enduring romantic novel continues to engage and provoke readers.

Pages: 604 Lexile Level: 890 ISBN: 13:978-1593080075

Title: The Glass Castle

Author: Walls, Jeannette

Summary: Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Pages: 288 Lexile Level: 1010 ISBN 13: 9780743247535

Title : Bermuda Triangle

Author : Gail B. Stewart

Summary : The Bermuda Triangle shares stories of some of the unexplained disappearances and other odd phenomena that have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle, an area located within the triangle formed between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and speculate on the reasons for the mysteries.

Pages : 104 Lexile Level : 1210 ISBN -13: 9781601520562

Title: Things Fall Apart

Author: Chinua Achebe

Summary: Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

Pages : 224 Lexile Level : 890 ISBN -13: 9780385474542

Title: Kindred

By Octavia E. Butler

Summary: Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Pages : 288 Lexile Level : 580 ISBN-139780807083697

Title: Neverwhere

by: Neil Gaiman

Summary: Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.

“A fantastic story that is both the stuff of dreams and nightmares” (San Diego Union-Tribune), Neil Gaiman’s first solo novel has become a touchstone of urban fantasy, and a perennial favorite of readers everywhere.

Pages : 400 Lexile Level : 760 ISBN-139780060557812

Title: In Cold Blood

by: Truman Capote

Summary: On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

Pages : 384 Lexile Level : 1040 ISBN -13 9780451154460

Title: The Circle

By: Dave Eggers

Summary: When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Pages : 512 Lexile Level : 850 ISBN -13 9780345807298

Title: The Nazi Hunter

By Alan Elsner

Summary: Nicknamed "the Nazi Hunter," Marek Cain, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Justice Department, has for ten years been the point man for tracking down ex-Nazis who have fraudulently entered this country since World War II and bringing them to justice.

One late afternoon, a distraught German woman eludes security and slips into Cain's office. "I have documents," she says, "important documents only for the Nazi Hunter." She promises to bring them the next day. When she doesn't

show, he dismisses her as just another crackpot. But when he reads in the Washington Post next morning that the woman has been brutally murdered, he senses he's on to something big. He must find those documents. The trail leads from Washington to Miami, to Boston, back to the Belzec concentration camp in Poland, where half a million Jews were murdered in the winter of 1942, and into the lair of America's fascist militias.

Pages : 336 Lexile Level : 900 ISBN --13: 978-1611450569

Title: The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

Summary: Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

Pages : 224 Lexile Level : 920 ISBN-13- 9780679433736

Title: Ship Breaker

by Paulo Bacigalupi

Summary: In America's flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota--and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life....

In this powerful novel, Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a thrilling, fast-paced adventure set in a vivid and raw, uncertain future devastated by the forces of climate change

Pages :336 Lexile Level : 690 ISBN-139780316081689

Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By Stephen Chbosky

Summary: Read the cult-favorite coming of age story that takes a sometimes heartbreaking, often hysterical, and always honest look at high school in all its glory. Also a major motion picture starring Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a funny, touching, and haunting modern classic.

The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

Pages : 213 Lexile Level : 720 ISBN-139780671027346

Title: The Book Thief

By Markus Zusak

Summary: It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

Pages : 560 Lexile Level : 730 ISBN-139780385754729

Title : Uglies

by Scott Westerfeld

Summary: Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. Not for her license -- for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be there.

But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. She'd rather risk life on the outside. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world -- and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. The choice Tally makes changes her world forever.

Pages : 448 Lexile Level : 770 ISBN-139781416934509

Title : Looking for Alaska by: John Green

Summary: Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . . After. Nothing is ever the same.

Pages : 160 Lexile Level : 930 ISBN-13 9781101434208

Title: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by: Ransom Riggs

Summary: A mysterious island.An abandoned orphanage.A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive. A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

Pages : 392 Lexile Level : 890 ISBN-13 9781594749711

Title: Every Day

by David Levithan

Summary: In his New York Times bestselling novel, David Levithan introduces readers to what Entertainment Weekly calls a "wise, wildly unique" love story about A, a teen who wakes up every morning in a different body, living a different life.

Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.

There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.

It’s all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with—day in, day out, day after day.

Pages : 325 Lexile Level : 650 ISBN-13 9780307975638

Title : The Girls of Atomic City (nonfiction)

by: Danise Kiernan

Summary: The incredible story of the young women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of the most significant moments in U.S. history. The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project's secret cities, it didn't appear on any maps until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using more electricity than New York City and was home to more than 75,000 people, many of them young women recruited from small towns across the South. Their jobs were shrouded in mystery, but they were buoyed by a sense of shared purpose, close friendships--and a surplus of handsome scientists and Army men!

But against this vibrant wartime backdrop, a darker story was unfolding. The penalty for talking about their work--even the most innocuous details--was job loss and eviction. One woman was recruited to spy on her coworkers. They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb.

Though the young women originally believed they would leave Oak Ridge after the war, many met husbands there, made lifelong friends, and still call the seventy-year-old town home. The reverberations from their work there--work they didn't fully understand at the time--are still being felt today. In The Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan traces the astonishing story of these unsung WWII workers through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, this is history and science made fresh and vibrant--a beautifully told, deeply researched story that unfolds in a suspenseful and exciting way.

Pages : 416 Lexile Level : ? ISBN-13 9781451617535

Title: Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring that Saved the American Revolution (nonfiction)

by: Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger

Summary: When George Washington beat a hasty retreat from New York City in August 1776, many thought the American Revolution might soon be over. Instead, Washington rallied—thanks in large part to a little-known, top-secret group called the Culper Spy Ring. He realized that he couldn’t defeat the British with military might, so he recruited a sophisticated and deeply secretive intelligence network to infiltrate New York.

Drawing on extensive research, Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger have offered fascinating portraits of these spies: a reserved Quaker merchant, a tavern keeper, a brash young longshoreman, a curmudgeonly Long Island bachelor, a coffeehouse owner, and a mysterious woman. Long unrecognized, the secret six are finally receiving their due among the pantheon of American heroes.

Pages : 272 Lexile Level : 1150 ISBN-978-1595231109

Title : Alexander Hamilton (Biography)

by: Ron Chernow

Summary: In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.”

Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, co-authoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans

ages: 832 Lexile Level : 1280 ISBN-139780143034759

Title: On the Other Side

by: Carrie Hope Fletcher

Summary: Your soul is too heavy to pass through this door,

Leave the weight of the world in the world from before

Evie Snow is eighty-two when she quietly passed away in her sleep, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. It's the way most people wish to leave the world but when Evie reaches the door of her own private heaven, she finds that she's become her twenty seven- year-old self and the door won't open. Evie's soul must be light enough to pass through so she needs to get rid of whatever is making her soul heavy. For Evie, this means unburdening herself of the three secrets that have weighed her down for over fifty years, so she must find a way to reveal them before it's too late. As Evie begins the journey of a lifetime, she learns more about life and love than she ever thought possible, and somehow , some way, she may also find her way back to her long lost love...

Pages : 345 Lexile Level : 930 ISBN-13 978-0751563146

Title: The Hate U Give

by: Angie Thomas

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping YA novel about one girl's struggle for justice. Movie rights have sold to Fox, with Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games) to star.

Pages : 444 Lexile Level : 590 ISBN-13 9780062498533