Accidental Adventures of India McAllister

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The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister
by Charlotte Agell

India McAllister hopes that fourth grade brings her plenty of fun and adventures in her small town in Maine. She camps out and looks for UFOs with her friend Colby, tries to catch her father’s new bird that gets loose in the house, and takes walks into the woods with her dog. India is also navigating a number of personal issues, including her parents’ divorce, confusing feelings for her father’s implied boyfriend, embarrassment over a plaster breast that hangs in the living room as a reminder that her mother survived breast cancer, and the fact that she was adopted from China.


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690 Middle School 160 Adventure 2010 0805089020

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Nineteen Minutes

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Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult

These are the words that seventeen-year-old Peter Houghton says when he is found after a school shooting spree huddling with a gun in his hand by Detective Patrick Ducharme. An outcast who had been bullied since kindergarten, Peter kills ten, including a teacher, and injures many more.

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At first glance, it looks like a straightforward act of revenge, but things are revealed to be more complex. One of his victims is Matt Royston, the boyfriend of his former childhood friend, Josie Cormier, and others are members of the in-crowd, but others have seemingly no relation. In the days before the trial, and in the days leading up to the shooting, we are given the backstory, told mostly from Josie’s, Peter’s, and their mothers’ viewpoint. We learn of the incessant teasing this boy received, adults’ unsuccessful attempts to help him fit in, and of the stormy relationship between Josie and Matt.

During the trial, we hear from the victims who survived and the devastation the crime has wrought on their lives. In the end, the reader may still be undecided whether Peter is primarily a victim, perpetrator, loyal friend, or all three, but that is the point.


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890L Young Adult 460 Thriller/Suspense 2007 0743496736

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Heading Home

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Heading Home
by Renee Riva

Heading Home is book three in the ‘Saving Sailor trilogy.’

When A.J. returns home to Indian Island, her dog Sailor, and childhood friend Danny, she surprises everyone with her plans . . . but Danny has something else in mind.

For eight years, A.J. Degulio has been itching to get back to her beloved Indian Island. It’s home. But a lot has changed: Sailor moves slower, Danny has grown into a man… and A.J. has a promise to keep… but it doesn’t include Danny. When Danny discovers the truth, he’s shocked and hurt. But he won’t stand in the way of what she really wants.

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What’s a girl to do? She wants to keep her promise and Danny. But Danny has plans of his own. Can they work it out? It will take compromise and laughter before Danny and A.J. figure out that home is more than a place on the map. It’s a place in the heart.


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690 Young Adult 272 Romance 2010 1434767760

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Priceless

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Priceless-A Novel on the Edge of the World
by Tom Davis

Photojournalist Stuart Daniels has found purpose in life. After suffering the fallout of a tragic assignment, Daniels rediscovered his faith while helping a young African orphan. Now his photo work carries a greater mission: To educate people about social injustice happening around the world.

Daniels next assignment carries him back overseas and into the heart of Russia. Once there, Daniels is persuaded by an old friend to help save two girls from a desperate situation. Soon he becomes a key player in a dangerous campaign to rescue helpless women trapped in the sex-slave trade.

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What Daniels encounters during his journey will shake his faith, test his courage, and even threaten his life. Yet as Daniels gets deeper and the stakes get higher, he will discover that hope can be found in the darkest of places.


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690 Young Adult 304 Adventure 2010 158919103X

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Billionaire’s Curse

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The Billionaire’s Curse
by Richard Newsome

Gerald Wilkins is an Australian youth who’s the recent heir to a fortune bequeathed to him by an English aunt he barely knew. While Gerald’s giddy, irresponsible parents use his good fortune to take a Caribbean vacation, the 12-year-old stays behind in London, facing threats connected to the recent theft of a world-renowned diamond.

His attempts to piece together how his aunt’s death and the diamond are connected involves sleuthing about museums and stuffy clubs, and leads to a dastardly attempt on his life by a creepy man of overwhelming strength who smells of bleach. Luckily, twins Ruby and Sam intervene, saving the new billionaire, and the threesome become fast friends.


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690 High School 352 Adventure 2010 0061944904

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shores of the Mississippi River, sometime between 1835 (when the first steamboat sailed down the Mississippi and 1845. Two young boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures. Huck has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to “sivilize” him.

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Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom Sawyer helps Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson’s slave, Jim. They meet up with Tom Sawyer’s self-proclaimed gang, who plot to carry out adventurous crimes.

Life is changed by the sudden appearance of his shiftless father “Pap,” an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap from acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move to the backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father’s cabin. Equally dissatisfied with life with his father, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately fakes his own death, and sets off down the Mississippi River.

This is a story of this teen-aged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious.


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990 High School 360 Adventure 2010 1904633463

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Handmaiden’s Tale

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Handmaiden’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood

This is a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right ideals have been carried to extremes in a mono-theocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist’s nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the “morally fit” Wives.

The tale is told by Offred (read: ‘of Fred’), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be


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750L Middle School School 392 Science Fiction 2006 0307264602

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Feed

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Feed
by M. T. Anderson

Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies’ attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School. But everything changes when he and his pals travel to the moon for spring break. There Titus meets home-schooled Violet, who thinks for herself, searches out news and asserts that “Everything we’ve grown up with the stories on the feed, the games, all of that it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to.”

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“Chats” flow privately from mind to mind; Titus flies an “upcar”; people go “mal” (short for “malfunctioning”) in contraband sites that intoxicate by scrambling the feed; and, after Titus and his friends develop lesions, banner ads and sitcoms dub the lesions the newest hot trend, causing one friend to commission a fake one and another to outdo her by getting cuts all over her body.


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770L High School 288 Science Fiction 2009 0763622591

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Catcher in the Rye

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The Catcher in the Rye

by J. D. Salinger


Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.

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790L High School 288 Adventure 2001 0316769177

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Natural

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The Natural
by Bernard Malamud

The book follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot by a socio-pathic serial killer. This story concerns itself with his attempts to return to baseball later in life, when he plays for the New York Knights with his legendary bat ‘Wonderboy..
Nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs, a country bumpkin with a great pitching arm, is on his way to Chicago to try out for the Chicago Cubs. He is on the train with the Cubs’ scout, Sam Simpson. While on the train, Roy meets a woman named Harriet Bird, for whom he immediately develops a crush. He also meets a sports journalist, Max Mercy, who is on the train with a famous baseball hitter, the Whammer.

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Fifteen years later, Pop Fisher, the manager of the New York Knights, discovers he has a new “rookie” for his team—a thirty-four-year-old man named Roy Hobbs, whom the team’s owner, the stingy Judge Banner, has signed for a paltry $3,000.
The story recounts Roy’s ups and downs and tragedy in his personal life.


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1060L High School 248 Historical Fiction 2003 0374502005

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