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Maine East Summer Reading List
1.
Breathing Underwater
by Alex Flinn
Comments
Like father, like son Intelligent, popular, handsome, and wealthy, sixteen-year-old Nick Andreas is pretty much perfect -- on the outside, at least. What no one knows -- not even his best friend -- is the terror that Nick faces every time he is alone with his father. Then he and Caitlin fall in love, and Nick thinks his problems are over. Caitlin is the one person who he can confide in. But when things start to spiral out of control, Nick must face the fact that he's gotten more from his father than green eyes and money.
2.
Briar Rose
by Jane Yolen
Comments
A powerful retelling of Sleeping Beauty that is “heartbreaking and heartwarming.” An American Library Association “100 Best Books for Teens” An American Library Association “Best Books for Young Adults” Ever since she was a child, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Gemma’s stories about Briar Rose. But a promise Rebecca makes to her dying grandmother will lead her on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Gemma’s astonishing claim: I am Briar Rose . A journey that will lead her to unspeakable brutality and horror. But also to redemption and hope.
4.
Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History
by Scott Andrew Selby
Comments
On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium and made off with over $108 million dollars worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process. Although the crime was perfect, the getaway was not. The police zeroed in on a band of professional thieves fronted by Leonardo Notarbartolo, a dapper Italian who had rented an office in the Diamond Center and clandestinely cased its vault for over two years. The “who” of the crime had been answered, but the “how” remained largely a mystery.
5.
Found (Missing)
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Comments
Thirteen-year-old Jonah has always known that he was adopted, and he's never thought it was any big deal. Then he and a new friend, Chip, who's also adopted, begin receiving mysterious letters. The first one says, "You are one of the missing." The second one says, "Beware! They're coming back to get you." Jonah, Chip, and Jonah's sister, Katherine, are plunged into a mystery that involves the FBI, a vast smuggling operation, an airplane that appeared out of nowhere, and people who seem to appear and disappear at will. The kids discover they are caught in a battle between two opposing forces that want very different things for Jonah and Chip's lives. Do Jonah and Chip have any choice in the matter? And what should they choose when both alternatives are horrifying?
6.
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
Comments
Eugneia "Skeeter" Phelan, a recent college graduate, has returned home to her family in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 during the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Aibileen and Minny are two African‐American women who have been employed by countless white families in Jackson as the "help," serving as both maids and nannies. Their worlds intersect when Skeeter realizes the racist injustices that befall these African‐American women who are not even allowed to use the bathrooms in their employees' homes. An aspiring journalist, Skeeter begins to secretly write a book that exposes the ugly truth of the racial divide. By doing so, Skeeter follows her heart and dreams but risks losing her friends, fiance, family, and reputation. Told in a shifting perspective between Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny, all three voices tell the story of this complex time in American society and demonstrate the power of truth and friendship.
7.
The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
Comments
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel, and it keeps the Districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.
8.
In the Lake of the Woods
by Tim O'Brien
Comments
First published to critical acclaim by Houghton Mifflin, Tim O’Brien’s celebrated classic In the Lake of the Woods now returns to the house in a gorgeous new Mariner paperback edition. This riveting novel of love and mystery from the author of The Things They Carried examines the lasting impact of the twentieth century’s legacy of violence and warfare, both at home and abroad. When long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.
9.
Leaving Paradise
by Simone Elkeles
Comments
Nothing has been the same since Caleb Becker left a party drunk, got behind the wheel, and hit Maggie Armstrong. Even after months of painful physical therapy, Maggie walks with a limp. Her social life is non-existent and a scholarship to study abroad—her chance to escape everyone and their pitying stares—has been canceled due to the ramifications of the accident. After a year in juvenile jail, Caleb’s free . . . if freedom means endless nagging from a transition coach and the prying eyes of the entire town. Coming home should feel good, but his family and ex-girlfriend seem like strangers. Caleb and Maggie are outsiders, pigeon-holed as "criminal" and "freak." Then the truth emerges about what really happened the night of the accident and, once again, everything changes.
10.
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Comments
The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?
11.
The Nobody
by Jeff Lemire
Comments
This is an original graphic novel from an award-winning alternative comics artist! The tiny, isolated fishing village of Large Mouth never saw much excitement - until the arrival of the stranger, that is. Wrapped from head to toe in bandages and wearing weird goggles, he quietly took up residence in the sleepy town's motel. Driven by curiosity, the townfolk quickly learn the tragic story of his past, and of the terrible accident that left him horribly disfigured. Eventually, the town embraces the stranger as one of their own - but do his bandages hide more than just scars? Xeric Award-winner Jeff Lemire ("Essex County") explores themes of identity, fear and paranoia in a small community in a story that will keep you guessing until the very end.
12.
The Orange Houses
by Paul Griffin
Comments
Meet Tamika Sykes—Mik to her friends (if she had any). She’s hearing impaired and way too smart for her West Bronx high school. She copes by reading lips and selling homework answers, and looks forward to the time each day when she can be alone in her room drawing. She’s a tough girl who never gets close to anyone, until she meets Fatima, a teenage refugee who sells newspapers on Mik’s block. Both Mik and Fatima unite in their efforts to befriend Jimmi, a homeless vet who is shunned by the rest of the community. The events that follow when these three outcasts converge will break open their close-knit community and change the lives of those living in the Orange Houses in explosive and unexpected way
13.
Paper Towns
by John Green
Comments
Finding a dead man in the neighborhood park introduces a pair of 9‐year‐olds, Margo and Quentin, to the mysteries of life. Next‐door neighbors and friends, they grow apart academically and socially: Margo spontaneously questions and explores while Quentin carefully thinks and plans. One month before their high school graduation, Margo disappears and Quentin must unfold a mystery to find her. As his best friends shop for tuxedoes and argue about cummerbunds with their girlfriends, Quentin uncovers clues‐‐a poster, a poem, and a map‐‐to try to find his childhood friend. Though filled with high school humor and adolescent antics, John Green's quasi‐mystery reveals truths about identity and expectations, acceptance and rejection, and endings and beginnings.
14.
Plain Truth
by Jodi Piccoult
Comments
The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to defend Katie, two cultures collide -- and, for the first time in her high-profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own. Delving deep inside the world of those who live "plain," Ellie must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. And as she unravels a tangled murder case, Ellie also looks deep within -- to confront her own fears and desires when a man from her past reenters her life. Moving seamlessly from psychological drama to courtroom suspense, Plain Truth is a fascinating portrait of Amish life -- and a moving exploration of the bonds of love, friendship, and the heart's most complex choices.
15.
Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and with (Almost) No Money
by Dolly Freed
Comments
In the 1970s Dolly Freed lived of the land dirt cheap and plum easy. Living in their own house on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia for almost five years, Dolly and her father produced their own food and drink and spent roughly $700 each per year. After discussing reasons why you should or shouldn't give up your job, Possum Living gives you details about the cheapest ways with the best results to buy and maintain your home, dress well, cope with the law, stay healthy, and keep up a middle-class facade — whether you live in the city, in the suburbs, or in a small town. In a delightful, straightforward style Dolly Freed explains how to be lazy, proud, miserly, and honest, live well and enjoy leisure.
16.
Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
Comments
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life
17.
Secrets Of A Civil War Submarine: Solving The Mysteries Of The H. L. Hunley
by Sally M. Walker
Comments
Presents the history of the Civil War submarine the H.L. Hunley, including the construction, mysterious sinking, recovery, and restoration.
Comments
For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment.
19.
Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Comments
Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth.
20.
Stitches: A Memoir
by David Small
Comments
The prize-winning children’s author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir. One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small, a prize-winning children’s author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays by his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist.
21.
The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life
by Ben Sherwood
Comments
Which is the safest seat on an airplane? Where is the best place to have a heart attack? Why does religious observance add years to your life? How can birthdays be hazardous to your health? THE SURVIVORS CLUB Each second of the day, someone in America faces a crisis, whether it's a car accident, violent crime, serious illness, or financial trouble. Given the inevitability of adversity, we all wonder: Who beats the odds and who surrenders? Why do some people bound back and others give up? How can I become the kind of person who survives and thrives? The fascinating, hopeful answers to these questions are found in THE SURVIVORS CLUB. In the tradition of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point , this book reveals the hidden side of survival by combining astonishing true stories, gripping scientific research, and the author's adventures inside the U.S. military's elite survival schools and the government's airplane crash evacuation course.
22.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
by Jeffrey Toobin
Comments
Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. Just in time for the 2008 presidential election—where the future of the Court will be at stake—Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.
23.
The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Comments
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant. An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.
24.
When the World Was Young: A Novel
by Tony Romano
Comments
In Chicago, in the summer of 1957, Italian immigrants Angela Rosa and Agostino Peccatori are caught between worlds, as they cling to old-country ways in an era of upending change. Angela Rosa must cope with the building tension—exacerbated by Agostino's wandering eye—of raising five U.S.-born children who are struggling to define themselves within a family rooted in old-world tradition. But the events of a single tragic evening are about to bring all of their lives to a sudden, irreversible standstill—as a once resilient family begins to unravel under a crushing burden of guilt. A poignant testament to the power of sacrifice, loyalty, and unconditional love, When the World Was Young is a stunning tale of one family's will to survive.
Created by parkridgeya
Category: Reading Lists - e.g. 'What I want to read next'
























