books – Page 8

Billionaire’s Curse

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
690	High School	352	Adventure	2010	0061944904

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
990	High School	360	Adventure	2010	1904633463

Handmaiden’s Tale

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
750L	Middle School School	392	Science Fiction	2006	0307264602

Feed

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
770L	High School	288	Science Fiction	2009	0763622591

Catcher in the Rye

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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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Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
790L	High School	288	Adventure	2001	0316769177

Natural

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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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.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
1060L	High School	248	Historical Fiction	2003	0374502005

Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
by Robert Olen Butler

This book is a collection of 17 anthologies, all written in the first person that blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American pop culture and family drama into a woven fabric that tells the stories of those who actually served in the Vietnamese War.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
1070L	High School	288	Autobiography	2001	0802137989

Of Mice and Men

Posted on September 23, 2013 by webmaster

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

This is a story of the strange friendship between a strong man and a giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant man-child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find – in a ranch – what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them.

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Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
630L	High School	112	Historical Fiction	2002	0142000671

Code Talker

Posted on September 21, 2013 by webmaster

Code Talker
by Joseph Bruchac

Ned Begay is transplanted from his family’s home at the age of six, and sent to a boarding school to learn English and the American way of life. There he is given a new name and clothes and forbidden to speak his native language Navajo. When he is 16, he is recruited to join the Marines, and shortly afterwards he enlists and is sent to boot camp.

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He discovers that his Navajo language, which he has been using only in secret for years, is the secret weapon that the U.S. is using in their war against the Japanese. As a Navajo code talker, Ned is able to use his native language to save countless American lives, and his experiences in the Pacific – from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima to Okinawa -change him forever.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
910	Middle School	240	Historical Fiction	2005	9780439891004

Suite Scarlett

Posted on September 21, 2013 by webmaster

Suite Scarlett
by Maureen Johnson

The Hopewell Hotel, 75 years ago a stylish Upper East Side haunt, has fallen on hard times. Its proprietors, the Martin family, have let the last remaining employee go, and now it is up to the four children, Spencer, Lola, Scarlett, and Marlene, to keep things afloat. Enter one Mrs. Amy Amberson, a flamboyant, mysterious guest, back in New York after a long absence, with some clandestine motives. Mrs. Amberson is to occupy the Empire Suite, just today entrusted to Scarlett as a ‘present’ on her fifteenth birthday (a family tradition), for the entire summer, and keeping her happy will test Scarlett’s ingenious mettle.

Lexile Level	Content Rating	Number of Pages	Genre	Date Published	ISBN Number
690L	Middle School	368	Adventure	2009	0545096324

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