2007 Summer Reading - Tenth Grade
 (printable format)

Students are to choose THREE books to read. For ONE book, the student will make an 8 1/2 x 11 poster that contains the following information:

An artistic representation means a drawing, magazine cut outs that represent your thoughts or perhaps even a 3-D representation of some important aspect of the book. The poster should be cardboard or poster board but not to exceed 8 1/2 x 11" size poster. The English teacher will tell you the type of assessment style for the other two books during the second week of September. This project will be due during the second week of school.
 

Summer Reading 2007 Book List

Bertrand, Diane Gonzales - Sweet Fifteen
When seamstress Rita Navarro makes a quinceanera dress for fourteen-year-old Stefanie, she finds herself becoming involved with the girl's family and attracted to Stefanie's uncle.

Crutcher, Chris -Ironman : A Novel 
 While training for a triathlon, seventeen-year-old Bo attends an anger management group at school which leads him to examine his relationship with his father.  

Dai, Sijie - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 
 Two boys, moved to the country for "re-education" as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution, find little to amuse them, but things change when they discover a stash of Western classics in Chinese translation and use the stories of Balzac to capture the attention of the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.

Finney, Jack - Time and Again
Illustrator Si Morley steps out of his twentieth-century New York apartment one night--right into the winter of 1882.

Hartinger, Brent - Geography Club
A group of gay and lesbian teenagers finds mutual support when they form the "Geography Club" at their high school.

Hautman, Pete – Sweetblood.
After a lifetime of being a model student, sixteen-year-old Lucy Szabo is suddenly in trouble at school, at home and with the "proto-vampires" she has met online and in person, and most of all with her uncontrolled diabetes.

Hoobler, Dorothy - The Ghost In the Tokaido Inn
 While attempting to solve the mystery of a stolen jewel, Seikei, a merchant's son who longs to be a samurai, joins a group of kabuki actors in eighteenth-century Japan.

Johnson, Angela - Toning the Sweep
 On a visit to her grandmother Ola, who is dying of cancer in her house in the desert, fourteen-year- old Emmie hears many stories about the past and her family history.

Lee, MarieG. - Necessary Roughness
Sixteen-year-old Korean American Chan moves from Los Angeles to a small town in Minnesota, where he must cope not only with racism on the football team but also with the tensions in his relationship with his strict father.
 

Lekuton, Joseph – Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna.
From a green and beautiful village in Kenya comes this firsthand account of a boy's journey to manhood. Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, a Maasai tribesman, is the only child in his family to go to school.  He is torn between the traditional ways of his family and the western ways taught by his teachers.
 

Mah, Adeline Yen – Chinese Cinderella: The True Storey of an Unwanted Daughter.
A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.      

 Martinez, Victor - Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida : A Novel 
 Manny relates his coming of age experiences as a member of a poor Mexican American family in which the alcoholic father only adds to everyone's struggle.

Meyer, Carolyn - Drummers of Jericho
 A fourteen-year-old Jewish girl goes to live with her father and stepmother in a small town and soon finds herself the center of a civil rights battle when she objects to the high school band marching in the formation of a cross.

Meyer, Carolyn - Where the Broken Heart Still Beats: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker
 Having been taken as a child and raised by Comanche Indians, thirty-four-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is forcibly returned to her white relatives, where she longs for her Indian life and her only friend is her twelve-year-old cousin Lucy.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith - An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio
 Twelve stories about young people caught between their Puerto Rican heritage and their American surroundings.

Perkins, Mitali - Moonsoon Summer
Secretly in love with her best friend and business partner Steve, fifteen-year-old Jazz must spend the summer away from him when her family goes to India to help set up a clinic.

Randle, Kristen D. - Breaking Rank
The Clan, as the clique is called, is a highly nontraditional gang. This is a story of how the group comes into conflict with the regimented social hierarchy of the high school.

Sedgwick, Marcus – The Book of Dead Days
With the help of his servant, Boy, and an orphan girl, a magician named Valerian searches graveyards, churches, and underground waterways for a book he hopes will save him from a pact he has made with evil. 

Shusterman, Neil – Full Tilt
 When sixteen-year-old Blake goes to a mysterious, by-invitation-only carnival he somehow knows that it could save his comatose brother, but soon learns that much more is at stake if he fails to meet the challenge presented there by the beautiful Cassandra.

Spiegelman, Art - Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds HistorylHere My Troubles Began
By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiege1man compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.

Stratton, Allan - Chanda's Secrets.  Chanda is an astonishingly perceptive girl living in a small city in southern Africa.   When her youngest sister dies, the first hint of HIV/AIDS emerges.  Chanda  must confront undercurrents of shame and stigma.  Not afraid to explore the horrific realities of AIDS, Chanda's Secrets, also captures the enduring strength of loyalty, friendship. and family ties. It is a story about the corrosive nature of secrets and the healing power of the truth.

Temple, Frances - Taste of Salt : A Story o f Modern Haiti
 In the hospital after being beaten by Macoutes, l7-year-old Djo tells the story of his impoverished life to a young woman who, like him, has been working with the social reformer Father Aristide to fight the repression in Haiti.

Ung, Loung - First They Killed My Father .: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
 Loung Ung, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh, tells of her experiences after her family was forced to flee from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, discussing her training as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, and telling of how her surviving siblings were eventually reunited-

Yang, Gene Len - American Born Chinese
When Jin Wang's family moves to a new neighborhood, he suddenly finds that he's the only Chinese-American student at his school.  Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends.  Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl...