Welcome to the 2018 Summer Reading List for students entering Class VIII in September!
This summer, you are required to read a total of five books. Read the required book for Class VIII, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, plus four other books of your choosing from the summer reading list. Of course, we welcome and encourage you to read more than five, if you’d like!
Students are asked to avoid reading the following works, which are part of Middle and Upper School English curriculum:
This Boy’s Life, The Crucible, Macbeth, Annie John, Romeo and Juliet, The Glass Menagerie, The Little Foxes, Twelfth Night, A Doll’s House, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and As I Lay Dying.
This list is available on the Nightingale Library page.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior-to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.
Fiction
Celeste lives a charmed life in the house on Butterfly Hill-one of many hills in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso-with her physician parents, doting nanny, and Jewish abuela, who came to Chile as a refugee years ago to escape Nazi rule in Austria. When a military coup wracks the country, Celeste's socialist-leaning parents become public enemies, which requires them to go into hiding and the eleven-year-old to be sent to stay with her aunt in Maine.
The Garcia family arrives in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi, a doctor, has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from everything she has ever known, must find herself. The girls are trying to lose themselves by forgetting their Spanish and straightening their hair. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father’s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends.
A devastating portrait of the extremes of self-deception in this brutal and poetic deconstruction of how one girl stealthily vanishes into the depths of anorexia. Lia has been down this road before: her competitive relationship with her best friend, Cassie, once landed them both in the hospital, but now not even Cassie’s death can eradicate Lia’s disgust of the “fat cows” who scrutinize her body all day long.
Two sisters of opposing temperaments share the pangs of tragic love. Their mutual suffering brings a closer understanding between the two sisters, and true love finally triumphs.
Flora Banks is 17 years old, but she knows this only because it's written on her hand. She can't remember anything that's happened since she was 10, when a brain tumor left her unable to make new memories.
When Flora's parents leave for Paris to be with Flora's dying brother they think Paige will "babysit" Flora. Except Paige doesn't. Flora decides to fly to Svalbard, where she intends to kiss Drake and "remember it to infinity."
Ivy Breedlove's family is driving her crazy. Generations of Breedloves have been prominent lawyers and her relatives expect her to follow suit. "We'll make her a lawyer yet!" they pronounce at a family reunion. Well, not if Ivy has her say. But how do you have your say when the voices surrounding you are so loud? Ivy's passion for the past provides an answer. As she works on completing a history of her illustrious family, she discovers other Breedlove women who broke the mold, including her father's sister Josephine.
It's 1895 and after the mysterious death of her mother, sixteen-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from India to a boarding school in England. Lonely and prone to visions of the future, Gemma is now being followed by a mysterious young Indian man who's been sent to watch her. But why?
This novel is about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester.
What is it like to be an illegal alien in New York now? Nadira, 14, relates how her family left Bangladesh, came to the U. S. on a tourist visa, and stayed long after the visa expired. (Everyone does it. You buy a fake social security number for a few hundred dollars and then you can work. ) Their illegal status is discovered, however, following 9/11, when immigration regulations are tightened. When the family hurriedly seeks asylum in Canada, they are turned back, and Nadira's father, Abba, is detained because his passport is no longer valid. Deportation seems to be the next step.
Charlie is a freshman and while's he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. He's a wallflower—shy and introspective, and intelligent beyond his years. We learn about Charlie through the letters he writes to someone of undisclosed name, age, and gender. Charlie encounters the same struggles that many kids face in high school such as how to make friends, the intensity of a crush, family tensions, and a first relationship.
Three teenagers thoughtlessly steal a stop sign from a dangerous intersection on a dare. The expedition goes without a hitch until they learn that a young mother has been killed in an accident caused by the missing stop sign. The whole community is up in arms, and the grieving widower appears on TV with his son, offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the vandals. The teenagers are filled with remorse and guilt as they grapple with the consequences of their prank.
In the blink of an eye everything changes. Seventeen year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall what happened afterwards, watching her own damaged body being taken from the wreck. Little by little she struggles to put together the pieces—to figure out what she has lost, what she has left, and the very difficult choice she must
Thirteen-year-old Isabelle Lee's family is reeling from the recent death of her beloved father when little sister April (aka Ape Face) finds Isabelle purging her dinner in the bathroom. Isabelle is sent to group therapy for her eating disorder, where she is shocked to discover that her school's most perfect and popular girl, Ashley Barnum, is also bulimic. Ashley is delighted to find a likeminded classmate, and she takes the previously unpopular Isabelle under her wing.
In the blink of an eye everyone disappears. Everyone is gone—everyone except for the young, teens, middle schoolers, and toddlers. There is not a single adult to be found—no teachers, no cops, no doctors, and no parents. Gone, too, are the phones, internet, and television. There is no way to get help. Hunger threatens. Bullies rule. A sinister creature lurks. Animals are mutating. And the teens themselves are changing, developing new talents—unimaginable, dangerous, deadly powers—that grow stronger by the day.
"It's not fair," complains 16-year-old Hazel from Indiana. "The world," says Gus, her new friend from her teen support group, "is not a wish-granting factory." In fact, life is not fair; Hazel and Gus both have cancer, Hazel's terminal. Despite this, she has a burning obsession: to find out what happens to the characters after the end of her favorite novel. An Imperial Affliction by Dutch author Peter Van Houten is about a girl named Anna who has cancer, and it ends in mid-sentence (presumably to indicate a life cut short), a stylistic choice that Hazel appreciates but the ambiguity drives her crazy.
Radley's parents had warned her that all hell would break loose if the American People's Party took power. And now, with the president assassinated and the government cracking down on citizens, the news is filled with images of vigilante groups, frenzied looting, and police raids. It seems as if all hell has broken loose.
Sixteen-year-old Mark and Bryon have been like brothers since childhood, but now, as their involvement with girls, gangs, and drugs increases, their relationship seems to gradually disintegrate. When Bryon discovers that Mark is a drug pusher, he is faced with a difficult decision.
What do a 12-year-old student who moonlights as a tie salesman, a tall, outspoken girl, a gay middle schooler and a kid branded as a hooligan have in common? Best friends for years, they've all been the target of cruel name-calling and now that they're in seventh grade, they're not about to take it anymore. They are the “misfits.”
At fourteen, Marley knows she has Momma's hands and Pops's love for ice cream, that her brother doesn't get on her nerves too much, and that Uncle Jack is a big mystery. But Marley doesn't know all she thinks she does, because she doesn't know the truth. And when the truth comes down with the rain one stormy summer afternoon, it changes everything. It turns Momma and Pops into liars. It makes her brother a stranger and Uncle Jack an even bigger mystery. All of a sudden, Marley doesn't know who she is anymore and can only turn to the family she no longer trusts to find out.
Twelve-year-old Y'Tin is brave. No one in his village denies that. It takes a great deal of courage to deal with elephants the way that Y'Tin does. He is almost the best trainer in the village and is certainly the youngest. Maybe he’ll even open up his own school someday to teach other Montagnards how to train wild elephants. That was the plan before American troops pulled out of the Vietnam War, before his village became occupied
by Viet Cong forces seeking revenge, before Y'Tin watched his life change in a million terrible ways.
The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past.
Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
Frankie Landau-Banks attempts to take over a secret, all-male society at her exclusive prep school, and her antics with the group soon draw some unlikely attention and have unexpected consequences that could change her life forever.
Six months in an isolated Antarctic research station give Harper, a recent high school graduate, time to reflect and heal after the painful end of her ballet aspirations. Withdrawn Harper Scott arrives at the McMurdo station, having pulled strings because of her family relationship to the famous Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott.
If what you see is what you get, Jules is in serious trouble. Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It's not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that. What she can't handle is the recurring vision that haunts her. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode...and nine body bags in the snow.
Twelve-year-old Frankie is utterly bored until she hears about her older brother's wedding. He returns from Alaska to Georgia, and Frankie decides she will go, uninvited, on the honeymoon.
Lizzie and Karl’s mother is a zoo keeper working in Dresden, Germany, during World War II. The family has become attached to an orphaned elephant there named Marlene, who will be destroyed as a precautionary measure so she and the other animals don’t run wild should the zoo be hit by bombs.
D. J.'s family members don't talk much, especially about the fact that 15-year-old D. J. does all the heavy work on their Wisconsin dairy farm since her father broke his hip and her two older brothers left for college. Nor do they talk about why D. J.'s mom, a teacher, is so busy filling in for the middle-school principal that she's never home. And they never, ever discuss the reason why her brothers haven't called home for more than six months.
"Monster" is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. But was Steve really the lookout who gave the "all clear" to the murderer, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? In this innovative novel by Walter Dean Myers, the reader becomes both juror and witness during the trial of Steve's life.
In 1863, fifteen-year-old Claire, the daughter of an Irish mother and an African father, faces ugly truths and great danger when Irish immigrants, enraged by the Civil War and a federal draft, lash out against African-Americans and wealthy "swells" of New York City. Rioting begins and no one is safe—not on the streets and not at home. This is an exciting and terrifying read – hard to put down.
The day the blizzard started, no one knew that it was going to keep snowing for a week. That for those in its path, it would become not just a matter of keeping warm, but of staying alive. Scotty and his friends Pete and Jason are among the last seven kids at their high school waiting to get picked up that day, and they soon realize that no one is coming for them.
The animals of Manor Farm are miserable. Mr. Jones, the owner of the farm, is a mean, heartless man who butchers the pigs and drowns dogs when they get too old. One day, a prize-winning boar named Old Major encourages the animals to rebel against the humans. Old Major dies just three days after proposing the rebellion. Three young pigs lead the resistance. When Mr. Jones gets drunk one night, the animals drive him and his men off the farm, which they rename Animal Farm. Together, the pigs write the Seven Commandments of Animalism, the new political philosophy that declares all animals equal. Can the farm animals do a better job than the humans did of being just?
Salva Dut is 11 years old when war raging in the Sudan separates him from his family. To avoid the conflict, he walks for years with other refugees, seeking sanctuary and scarce food and water. This story depicts the chaos of war and an unforgiving landscape as they expose Salva to cruelties both natural and man-made. The lessons Salva remembers from his family keep him from despair during harsh times in refugee camps and enable him, as a young man, to begin a new life in America. As Salva's story unfolds we learn about another Sudanese youth, Nya, and how these two stories connect contributes to the satisfying conclusion.
Chris Creed grew up as the class freak—the bullies' punching bag. After he vanished, the weirdness that had once surrounded him began spreading. It was as if a darkness reached out of his void to grab at the most normal, happy people—like some twisted joke or demented form of justice. It tore the town apart. Sixteen-year-old Torey Adams's search for answers opens his eyes to the lies, the pain, and the need to blame when tragedy strikes, and his once-safe world comes crashing down around him.
In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship. Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss, love, and the journey to adulthood.
In the early twentieth century, young orphan Maud Flynn hopes to finally be loved when she is adopted by the elderly Hawthorne sisters, but she is instead roped into the family's crooked séance business. Poor Maud!
This is the story of an upper class New England family's privileged life colliding with violent prejudices against immigrant Cambodians. After a tragic accident, Franklin is hit and killed by a pickup truck driven by Chay, a Cambodian student in Franklin's prep school. Chay is not sent to jail, and racial tensions are sparked.
This classic is about a young Swiss student who uncovers the secret of animating lifeless matter and, by assembling body parts, creates a monster that vows revenge on his creator after being rejected from society.
One fall day in 2013, Richard and Sasha were strangers taking the public bus home from school, as they had done many times before. This time, Richard’s friends convinced him that lighting Sasha’s gauzy skirt with a match would be funny. It was not, and both of their lives changed forever.
This is a classic about the Nolans who lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919. Their daughter Francie and their son Neely know more than their fair share of the sufferings that are the lot of a big city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is an imaginative, alert, resourceful child who grows up right before our eyes.
After Peak Marcello is arrested for scaling a New York City skyscraper, he's left with two choices: wither away in Juvenile Detention or to go live with his long-lost father, who runs a climbing company in Thailand. Peak quickly learns that his father's renewed interest in him has strings attached. Big strings. He wants Peak to be the youngest person to reach the Everest summit and his motives are selfish at best. Even so, for a climbing addict like Peak, tackling Everest is the challenge of a lifetime. It is also one that could cost him his life.
Jessica thinks her life is over when she loses a leg in a car accident. She's not comforted by the news that she'll be able to walk with the help of a prosthetic leg. Who cares about walking when you live to run? It takes the support of family, friends, a coach, and her track teammates, to convince Jessica that she may actually be able to run again—but are they right?
Growing up in a progressive family in Bombay during World War II, 15-year-old Vidya hopes that college is in her future, though her classmates are preparing for arranged marriages. After her father is severely injured in a riot, her life suddenly changes. Vidya, her older brother, and their parents move to Madras to join her grandfather’s traditional household, where men and women live separately and Vidya’s powerful aunt disdains the newcomers. Vidya’s life is made miserable by this aunt and uncle. When Vidya finds time after chores and schoolwork, she escapes upstairs to her grandfather’s library, where she meets a young man who seems to understand her. The library is off limits to girls of course and being alone with a young man is unthinkable. Vidya does both.
Jade Butler, an African-American artist-in-the-making, lives with her mother in Portland, Ore., and travels by bus to private school, where she is both grateful for and resentful of the opportunities presented to her. In short, poetic chapters, Jade ponders her family, school, and neighborhood relationships, wondering where she fits in: "How I am someone's answered prayer but also someone's deferred dream."
A tale of a young man who purchases eternal youth at the expense of his soul, Dorian Gray is a wealthy Englishman who gradually sinks into a life of dissipation and crime. Despite his unhealthy behavior, his physical appearance remains youthful and unmarked by dissolution. Instead, a portrait of him catalogues every evil deed by turning his once handsome features into a hideous mask.
After meeting at their private school in New York, fifteen-year-old Jeremiah, who is black and whose parents are separated, and Ellie, who is white and whose mother has twice abandoned her, fall in love and then try to cope with peoples' reactions.
After fifteen-year-old Liz Hall is hit by a taxi and killed, she finds herself in a place that is both like and unlike Earth, where she must adjust to her new status and figure out how to "live."
Fantasy
&
Science Fiction
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begins a hilarious journey through space. The book is funny and the movie is funnier.
In this futuristic world most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment. There is a tragic romance between Titus and Violet who become deadly ill when her “feed” malfunctions.
The unnamed narrator in the introduction watches the Illustrated Man whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos that magically come to life. Each illustration proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere—without the benefit of a spaceship, or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally—our own children.
Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his NYC twentieth-century apartment one night right into the winter of 1882? The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed—or did it?
This is a very cool rewriting of Cinderella as a kickass mechanic in a plague-ridden future. Long after World War IV, with a plague called letumosis ravaging all six Earthen countries, teenage Cinder spends her days in New Beijing doing mechanical repairs to earn money for her selfish adoptive mother. Her two sisters will attend Prince Kai's ball wearing elegant gowns; Cinder, hated because she's a cyborg, won't be going. But then the heart-thumpingly cute prince approaches Cinder's business booth as a customer, starting a chain of events that links her inextricably with the prince and with a palace doctor who's researching letumosis vaccines. This doctor drafts cyborgs as expendable test subjects; none survive.
In a society where unwanted teens are salvaged for their body parts, three runaways fight the system that would "unwind" them. Connor's parents want to be rid of him because he's a troublemaker. Risa has no parents and is being unwound to cut orphanage costs. Lev's unwinding has been planned since his birth, as part of his family's strict religion. Brought together by chance, and kept together by desperation, these three unlikely companions make a harrowing cross-country journey.
One by one, five sixteen-year-old orphans are brought to a strange building. It is not a prison, not a hospital; it has no walls, no ceiling, no floor. Nothing but endless flights of stairs leading nowhere except back to a strange red machine. The five must learn to love the machine and let it rule their lives. But will they let it kill their souls? This chilling, suspenseful indictment of mind control is a classic of science fiction and will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.
The book recounts the adventures of Frodo and the Companions of the Ring as they try to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord and thereby foil him in his evil purpose.
This is an apocalyptic tale of Earth’s ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes. In the year 2000, a young man discovers ice-nine, which can set off a chain reaction more deadly than a nuclear bomb and a new prophet whose teachings sweep the world.
Phoebe finds herself drawn to Mallory, the strange and secretive new girl at school. Soon the two become as close as sisters . . . until Mallory’s magnetic older brother, Ryland, appears. Ryland has an immediate, exciting hold on Phoebe — but a dangerous hold, for she begins to question her feelings about her best friend and, worse, about herself.
Upon moving to Bixby, Oklahoma, fifteen-year-old Jessica Day learns that she is one in a special group born at the stroke of midnight who can roam the town at a secret hour while others sleep—and that she must fight the evil creatures who share her power. This is a very exciting story.
Mystery & Suspense
Alan Bradley
It's the beginning of a lazy summer in 1950 at the sleepy English village of Bishop's Lacey. Up at the great house of Buckshaw, aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce passes the time tinkering in the laboratory she's inherited from her deceased mother and an eccentric great uncle. When Flavia discovers a murdered stranger in the cucumber patch outside her bedroom window early one morning, she decides to leave aside her flasks and Bunsen burners to solve the crime herself, much to the chagrin of the local authorities.
When fifteen-year-old Emily Dickinson meets a mysterious, handsome young man who doesn't seem to know who she or her family is and playfully refuses to divulge his name, she's intrigued. She enjoys her secret flirtation with "Mr. Nobody"—until he turns up dead in her family's pond. She's stricken with guilt and is determined to discover who this enigmatic stranger was before he's buried in an anonymous grave, an investigation that takes her deep into town secrets, blossoming romance, and deadly danger.
After being accused and acquitted in the death of his girlfriend, seventeen-year-old David is sent to live with his aunt, uncle, and young cousin to avoid the media frenzy. But all is not well there. His aunt and uncle are not speaking, and twelve-year-old Lily seems intent on making David’s life a torment. And then there’s the issue of his older cousin Kathy’s mysterious death some years back. As things grow more and more tense, David starts to wonder if there something else that his family is trying to hide from?
Non-Fiction
Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence.
Heiligman uses the Darwin family letters and papers to craft a full-bodied look at the personal influences that shaped Charles' life as he worked mightily to shape his theories. This intersection between religion and science is where the book shines, but it is also an excellent portrait of what life was like during the Victorian era, a time when illness and death were ever present, and, in a way, a real-time example of the survival of the fittest.
Before she was in preschool, Jazz knew she wasn't a boy, and she didn't understand why no one else did. Her parents took her to meet with a well-versed therapist, who told them Jazz is transgender, and they started on a
Daughter Adeline Yen Mah
Adeline Yen Mah was the child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. Wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel stepmother. Adeline struggled for independence as she moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States to become a physician and writer.
Poetry
Hughes himself selected the poems for this volume, including his most famous poems, and some that had only previously been privately printed.
Graphic Novels
Jin Wang starts at a new school where he's the only Chinese-American student. When a boy from Taiwan joins his class, Jin doesn't want to be associated with an FOB like him. Jin just wants to be an all-American boy, because he's in love with an all-American girl. Danny is an all-American boy: great at basketball, popular with the girls. But his obnoxious Chinese cousin Chin-Kee's annual visit is such a disaster that it ruins Danny's reputation at school, leaving him with no choice but to transfer somewhere he can start all over again.
Opening with the bombing of the Birmingham Baptist Church, this volume highlights the growing violence and tensions among activists in the civil rights movement leading up to Freedom Summer and Johnson's eventual signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.