9th Grade – Summer Reading List 2010

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. The tough, tender, and darkly funny story of a teenage outcast.

Bonham, Frank. Durango Street. A story of an African-American youth in a delinquent gang and the dedicated people who try to rehabilitate him.

Clark, Mary Higgins. Where Are The Children? A mother is accused of the gruesome deaths of her children.

Cook, Robin. Mindbend. A thriller about the fight to save the soul of medicine from an overwhelming evil.

Cussler, Clive. Cyclops. A wealthy American financier disappears on a treasure hunt in an antique blimp. From Cuban waters, the blimp drifts toward Florida with a crew of dead men—Soviet cosmonauts.

Duncan, Lois. Locked in Time. In this chilling story of voodoo and evil, a young girl discovers that her new stepmother has killed her past husbands.

Hinton, S.E. Tex. A young boy grows up too fast and learns to cope with his father’s absence.

Horowitz, Anthony. Stormbreaker. The story of Alex Rider, a 14-year-old British boy, who is trying to solve the mysterious murder of his uncle. Funny and mysterious.

Lund, Doris. Eric. A mother writes graphically of her soccer star son’s battle with cancer.

Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. The story of a peasant family in rural India and the resignation and ingenuity with which they meet economic changes and natural disasters.

Moriarty, Jaclyn. Feeling Sorry for Celia. Through her letters, the life of a lonely teenage girl is explored.

Myers, Walter Dean. Fallen Angels. A boy just out of his Harlem high school enlists in the Army and spends a year on active duty in Vietnam.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. An African-American teenager who is on trial for the murder of a Harlem drugstore owner becomes a pawn in the hands of the juvenile justice system.

Myers, Walter Dean. Slam. Sixteen-year-old “Slam” Harris is counting on his noteworthy basketball talents to get him out of the inner city and give him a chance to succeed in life, but his coach sees things differently.
 
Sones, Sonya. Stop Pretending. An accessible book that deals with the tragedy of mental illness—its stigma, its realities, and its effects on a family.

Sones, Sonya. What My Mother Doesn’t Know. An exploration of first love, friends, and figuring out how to make sense of the world as a teenager.

Zindel, Paul. My Darling, My Hamburger. Four high school seniors struggle with the responsibilities of growing up, particularly the problems of an intimate relationship.

Required reading for Honors English I:

Orwell, George. 1984. A dictatorship called Big Brother rules the people in a collectivist society.