This story of Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who has reason to believe in miracles, begins in the winter of his 11th year when two schoolyard bullies break into the Lands' house, and Reuben's big brother, Davy, guns them down and is forced to go “on the lam.” Shortly after Davy's escape, Reuben, along with Swede, his younger sister and an aspiring writer of Romantic Western tales, and their father, a widowed school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota, determined to find the lost outlaw, Davy.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
A true crime story of H.H. Holmes, who dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurring during the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. The author strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities.
Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos
In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. Running just beneath the action is the story of how Gantos – once he was locked up in a small, yellow-walled cell – moved from wanting to be a writer to writing, which helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of several individuals impacted when a pandemic wipes out nearly ninety-nine percent of Earth’s population. Moving between the days leading up to the event and the twenty years that follow, it begins with one snowy night when Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT in the audience, leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, but Arthur is dead. As Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
ONLY students who possess an IEP and/or teacher accommodations
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Since the beginning of the school year, Melinda has found that it's been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud. What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors' big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it's because her parents' only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she's been struck mute: something else occurred at last summer’s party and she can’t seem to tell anyone the truth. (Contains subtle references to rape.)
Slam! by Walter Dean Myers
Harlem is the backdrop for Myer’s tales about “Slam” Harris, a seventeen-year-old boy whose dreams of playing basketball in the NBA overshadow everything else in his life. Although Slam has grandiose dreams of making millions, Slam is on his way to flunking out of high school. It is Slam’s attitude that changes as he reconciles a harsh reality with his dreams.