2007 Summer Reading - Twelfth 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

Albom, Mitch – The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Eddie, wounded war veteran, who believes he has lived an uninspired life. On his 83rd birthday a tragic accident kills him.  He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination but a place where your life is explained to you by five people.

Alvarez, Julia - How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
The story of the Garcia families adjustment to life in the United States.

Armstrong, Jennifer – Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World:The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Eudurance
Describes the events of the 1914 Shackleton Antarctic expedition when, after being trapped in a frozen sea for nine months, their ship, Endurance, was finally crushed, forcing Shackleton and his men to make a very long and perilous journey across ice and stormy seas to reach inhabited land.

Baldaccui, David – Wish You Well
Twelve-year-old Louisa Mae Cardinal lives in New York City in1940. When tragedy strikes, she and her brother must go with their invalid mother to live on their great-grandmother’s farm in the Virginia Mountains.

Bray, Libba – A Great and Terrible Beauty
After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.

 Brown, Dan – Angels & Demons
Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is shocked to find proof that the legendary secret society, the Illuminati--dedicated since the time of Galileo to promoting the interests of science and condemning the blind faith of Catholicism--is alive, well, and murderously active.

Chambers, Aidon- Postcards From No Man’s Land 
 Bookish, intense and self-conscious, Jacob Todd, 17, has left his English home to spend a few days in the Netherlands paying homage to the soldier grandfather he never knew, and visiting Geertrui, the Dutch woman who took care of his grandfather after he was wounded in battle. The second story, set in  occupied Holland at the time of the battle to liberate Oosterbeck, and narrated by Geertrui, chronicles her long-ago relationship with Jacob’s grandfather. As each narrative unwinds, parallels and differences between the two eras emerge.

Chambers, Veronica - Mama's Girl
 Memoir of the author's life growing up as an overachiever in an underprivileged family, chronicling the blessed relationship she forged with her mother after her father deserted the family.

Golding, William -  Lord of the Flies: A Novel
Stranded on an island while an atomic war destroys the rest of the world, a group of young boys revert to savagery as they struggle to survive. (Not like the movie)

Gruen, Sara - Water for Elephants
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, and misfits, in a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression.  Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menargie where he meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.

Gunther, John - Death Be Not Proud: A Memoir 
A biography of the author's son, who died at seventeen after a fourteen-month illness caused by a brain tumor. ("Holy Sonnet 10", the quoted poem in this story, is read in 12th grade.)

Hillenbrand, Laura – Seabiscuit: An American Legend
With his smallish stature, knobby knees, and slightly crooked forelegs, he looked more like a cow pony than a thoroughbred. But looks aren't everything; his quality, an admirer once wrote, "was mostly in his heart."

Horniman, Joanne - Mahalia
 Mahalia explores a real and relatively ignored issue-the problems and emotions of a teenage father. While Matt struggles with the stresses of taking care of a baby, he begins to realize that love will not conquer all.

Hosseini, Khaled -  The Kite Runner
”I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975." So begins The Kite Runner, a poignant tale of two motherless boys growing up in Kabul, a city teetering on the brink of destruction at the dawn of the Soviet invasion.

Kidd, Sue Monk - The Secret Life of Bees
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the lam with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's abusive father T. Ray and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote.

Koontz, Dean – Life Expectancy
Jimmy Tock is born on the night that his grandfather dies.  Before he dies, he predicts his grandson will have five dark days.  What terrifying nightmares await Jimmy on these five dark days?  What challenges must he survive?

Martel, Yann – Life of Pi
 Meet Pi Patel, a young man on the edge of adulthood when fate steps in and hastens his lessons in maturity. En route with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a few surviving animals. 

Mason, Bobbie Ann - In Country: A Novel 
Sam Hughes lives in Hopewell, Kentucky with her Uncle Emmett who is a Vietnam veteran. Sam's father was killed in Vietnam and, in an effort to understand about him and the war, she embarks on a pilgrimage with Emmett and her grandmother to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the "Wall", in Washington.

Mathabane, Mark - Kaffir Boy: the True Story of a Black Youth 's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
Recreates the author's boyhood experiences in South Africa.

Mayr, Ernst - This is Biology: The Science of the Living World
Biology is based on a muddle of combined causes, pure chance, and evidence drawn from unrelated areas, yet it is the one science that addresses those aspects of nature that can't be reduced to mere laws of chemistry or physics.

McLarty, Ron - The Memory of Running
After his parents are killed in an auto accident and he also learns of his sister's death in Los Angeles, Smithy Ide, overweight and friendless, embarks upon a transcontinental bicycle ride to claim his sister's body and rediscovers what it means to live.

McGraw, Phillip C. - Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters Describes the Ten Laws of Life that every person should know and explains how they can be used to improve all aspects of a person's life.

Reynolds, Sheri - The Rapture of Canaan
 Explores the experience of miracles in everyday life through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl, the granddaughter of a fundamentalist minister.

Simon, Lizzie- Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D 
 In this honest memoir, 23-year-old Simon writes of her life with bipolar disorder. Simon found out that  she was suffering from this mental illness while still in high school.

Stone, Irving - The Agony and the Ecstasy: a Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
 Michelangelo's career as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet is traced from his promising boyhood apprenticeships to the painter Ghirlandaio and the sculptor Bertoldo through all the years of his genius.