Palatine High School - Summer Reading List 2009
 English

 English

A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer with a small holding in the harsh north of the 1680s when he takes in Florens, a small slave girl, in part payment for a bad debt. She looks for love—first from Lina, an older servant woman, and later from a handsome African blacksmith, never enslaved. At its heart, this is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney (Illustrator)
Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Based on the author's own experiences and coupled with poignant drawings that reflect the character's art, this book chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he thought he was destined to live.

Animals in Translation:  Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
Do animals have friends?  Feel pain? Love humans? Find out. As an animal scientist and a person with autism, Temple Grandin’s professional training and personal history have created a perspective like no other thinker in the field, and this is her exciting, groundbreaking view of the intersection of autism and animal.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
by Barack Obama
In July 2004, before becoming the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what President Obama called “the audacity of hope.”

Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction
by David Sheff
Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view. Before meth, Sheff's son Nic was a varsity athlete, honor student, and award-winning journalist. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who stole money from his eight-year-old brother and lived on the streets. But it is not just about meth. Nic's addiction has wrought the same damage that any addiction will wreak. His story,and his father's, are those of any family that contains an addict—and one in three American families does.

The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Set during World War II in Germany, a foster girl named Leisel living outside of Munich scratches out a meager existence by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

Deadline
by Chris Crutcher
Ben Wolf has big things—secret things—planned for his senior year. He decides to become the best 127-pound football player
 

Trout High has ever seen; to give his close-minded civics teacher a daily migraine; and to help the local drunk clean up his act. Living with a secret isn't easy, though, and Ben's resolve begins to crumble . . . especially when he realizes that he isn't the only person in Trout with secrets.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
by E. Lockhart
At age 16, Frankie Landau-Banks is not the kind of girl to take "no" for an answer. Especially when "no" means she's excluded from her boyfriend's all-male secret society. Not when her ex-boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places. Not when she knows she's smarter than any of them. When she knows Matthew's lying to her. Who is Frankie Landau-Banks? Possibly a criminal mastermind. This is the story of how she got that way.  This is a freshmen selection.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
by Stephen King
On a weekend family outing, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland wanders off the main path of the Appalachian Trail between Maine and New Hampshire. Bruised, battered, and riddled with wasp and mosquito bites, Trisha braves treacherous slopes, fetid swamps, and terrifying nights stalked by an unidentified creature that leaves slaughtered animals and mangled trees in its wake.

House of the Winds
by Mia Yun
House of the Winds is a portrait of a family living in 1960s Korea after long years of Japanese rule and The Korean War. And it is the story of one mother and one daughter. Young Wife is a magic-wand mother who tells stories of the times when tigers smoked pipes. The daughter begins to see "how Korean women, descendents of the she-bear woman and the son of the king of heaven, lived in the folds of history...laughing, wailing, spirit-cajoling, poetry-writing, tear-hiding, bosom-bracing, scheming, fire-breathing."

Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
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 cruel Capitol 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. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival. This is a freshmen selection.

The Last Lecture

by Randy Pausch

When Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch was asked to give The Last Lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch combines the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon.

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers,” asking the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.


 

La Linea
by Ann Jaramillo
Miguel has been waiting forever for his father to tell him it is time to leave San Jacinto, Mexico, to join his parents in California. On his fifteenth birthday, he receives word that the time has come. To have any chance of getting to California, Miguel and his sister must jump onto a moving train, survive the streets of small towns, negotiate survival, face robbery and physical violence, and nearly die in their trek across the desert.  A work of fiction, this story is based on actual events. This is a freshmen selection.

Leaving Paradise
by Simone Elkeles
Nothing has been the same since Caleb Becker left a party drunk, got behind the wheel, and hit Maggie Armstrong. Maggie walks with a limp, her social life is nil and a scholarship to study abroad has been canceled. After a year in juvenile jail, Caleb is free—if freedom means enduring the prying eyes of the entire town. Caleb and Maggie are pigeon-holed as "criminal" and "freak." Then the truth emerges about what really happened the night of the accident and, once again, everything changes.

Life as We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Miranda is a normal 16-year-old girl whose main concerns are schoolwork, swim meets and the prom. But Miranda's world is literally ripped apart when an asteroid hits the moon, shifts it from its orbit and throws the earth into chaos. The story, told through a series of entries in Miranda's journal, chronicles the heroine's and her family's efforts to survive in a world where staying warm and having enough to eat and drink becomes the day-to-day priority.

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood

by Mark Kurzem
When the Nazis murdered his mother and fellow villagers, five-year-old Alex Kurzem hid until he was picked up by a group of Latvian SS soldiers. Able to hide his Jewish identity and win over the soldiers, he became their mascot and an honorary "corporal" in the SS with his own uniform. But what began as a desperate bid for survival became a performance that delighted the highest ranks of the Nazi elite. And so a young Jewish boy ended up starring in a Nazi propaganda film.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo. In the noble, ridiculous, and beautiful story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity—just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility—these universal themes dominate the novel.

The Other Boleyn Girl
by Phillipa Gregory
When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family’s ambitious plots when she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king, and take her fate into her own hands.

Pawn of Prophecy
by David Eddings
Long ago, the Storyteller claimed, in this first book of The Belgariad, the evil god Torak drove men and gods to war. But Belgarath the Sorcerer led men to reclaim the Orb that protected men of the West. So long as it lay at Riva, the prophecy went, men would be safe. But Garion did not believe in such stories. Brought up on a quiet farm by his Aunt Pol, how could he know that the Apostate planned to wake dread Torak, or that he would be led on a quest of magic and danger by those he loved—but did not know...?

Peeps
by Scott Westerfield
Cal Thompson was a college freshman only interested in meeting girls and partying—until a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman named Morgan that leaves him infected with a parasite that has a horrifying effect on its host.  While Cal remains an uninfected carrier of the bug, he's infected all the girlfriends he's had since Morgan. All three have turned into the ravening ghouls Cal calls Peeps. The rest of us know them as vampires. This is a freshmen selection.

The Road

 by Cormac McCarthy
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape except ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.

Road to Perdition
Max Allan Collins
In this graphic novel, set in 1929, Michael O'Sullivan is a good father and a family man — and also the chief enforcer for John Looney, the town's Irish Godfather of crime. As Looney's "Angel of Death," O'Sullivan has done the bidding of Chicago gangsters Al Capone and Frank Nitti as well — but when a gangland execution spells tragedy for the O'Sullivan family, a grieving father and his adolescent son find themselves on a winding road to treachery, revenge, and revelation.

Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
by Robert Kurson
In the fall of 1991, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, two weekend scuba divers discovered a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked to solve this mystery. This is a freshmen selection.

Sunrise Over Fallujah
by Walter Dean Myers
Operation Iraqi Freedom, that's the code name. And its soldiers include Birdy, a young recruit from Harlem who's questioning why he even enlisted; Marla, a wisecracking gunner; Jonesy, a guitar-playing bluesman who just wants to make it back to open a club. They are dropped incountry in Iraq, where they are supposed to help secure and stabilize the country and successfully interact with the Iraqi people. The young civil affairs soldiers soon find their definition of "winning" ever more elusive and their good intentions being replaced by terms like "survival" and "despair."

The Taking,

by Dean Koontz
The Taking tells the story of a community cut off from a world under siege, and the terrifying battle for survival waged by a young couple and their neighbors as familiar streets become fog-shrouded death traps. Gripping, heartbreaking, and triumphant in the face of mankind’s darkest hour, here is a small-town slice-of-doomsday thriller that strikes to the core of each of us to ask: What would you do in the midst of The Taking ?

Tortilla Curtain

by T.C. Boyle
Candido and America Rincon have come to Southern California from Mexico and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence until a freak accident brings freak Candido and Delaney together. The two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

by Nic Sheff
Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise. It's a harrowing portrait — but not one without hope.