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Fiction

The House of the Scorpion
Nancy Farmer
Lexile: 660
400 pages
ISBN: 9780689852220 (paperback)

Matteo Alacrán was not born; he was harvested. His DNA came from El Patrón, lord of a country called Opium -- a strip of poppy fields lying between the United States and what was once called Mexico. Matt's first cell split and divided inside a petri dish. Then he was placed in the womb of a cow, where he continued the miraculous journey from embryo to fetus to baby. He is a boy now, but most consider him a monster -- except for El Patrón. El Patrón loves Matt as he loves himself, because Matt is himself. As Matt struggles to understand his existence, he is threatened by a sinister cast of characters, including El Patrón's power-hungry family, and he is surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards. Escape is the only chance Matt has to survive. But escape from the Alacrán Estate is no guarantee of freedom, because Matt is marked by his difference in ways he doesn't even suspect.

--Description from publisher's website

Notes from the librarian: Did you like The Giver by Lois Lowry? If so, you might like Among the Hidden too.

Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut
Lexile: not available

Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

--Description from Bantam Books

Children of Men
PD James
Lexile: not available

The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race.

--Description from Randomhouse

Notes from the librarian: A movie version of Children of Men starring Clive Owen came out in 2006.

My Sister’s Keeper
Jodi Picoult
Lexile: 840

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate - a life and a role that she has never questioned… until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister - and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable… a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life… even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you like yourself less?

--Description from author’s website

Notes from the librarian: If you're a fan of Sarah Dessen's books, you might like My Sister's Keeper. Several of Jodi Picoult's other books have been adapted in TV movies for Lifetime and other cable networks and My Sister's Keeper is coming out in theaters this summer.

Paper Towns
John Green
Lexile: 850

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life--dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge--he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues--and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

--Description from author’s website

Notes from the librarian: It's hard to compare John Green's books to any other author, but if you've read or seen Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levitan, John Green's writing is similarly smart and funny.

Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
Lexile: not available

A spellbinding epic set in twelfth-century England, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known... of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect—a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.

--Description from Penguin Books

Notes from the librarian: At 900+ pages, this book is a big commitment, but it's worth it! Follett's descriptions are so vivid and detailed you feel like you're right there watching, listening and experiencing it all along with the characters.

That was Then, This is Now
S.E. Hinton
Lexile: 780

Bryon and Mark have been as close as brothers for as long as they can remember. Now things are changing. Bryon's growing up, and thinking seriously about who he wants to be. Mark still just lives for the thrill of the moment. The two are growing apart - but holding on - until Bryon faces a terrible decision - one that will change both of their lives forever.

--Description from author’s website

Notes from the librarian: S.E. Hinton was one the first authors to write about teenagers specifically for teenagers. She was just 16 when she complete her most famous book, The Outsiders.

The Host
Stephenie Meyer
Lexile: 640

Our world has been invaded by an unseen enemy. Humans become hosts for these invaders, their minds taken over while their bodies remain intact and continue their lives apparently unchanged. Most of humanity has succumbed. When Melanie, one of the few remaining "wild" humans is captured, she is certain it is her end. Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, was warned about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the glut of senses, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.

Wanderer probes Melanie's thoughts, hoping to discover the whereabouts of the remaining human resistance. Instead, Melanie fills Wanderer's mind with visions of the man Melanie loves—Jared, a human who still lives in hiding. Unable to separate herself from her body's desires, Wanderer begins to yearn for a man she has been tasked with exposing. When outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off on a dangerous and uncertain search for the man they both love.

--Description from author’s website

Notes from the librarian: This is from the author of the Twilight saga, but don't expect sparkly vampires and and teenage werewolves this time!

The Stand
Stephen King
Lexile: 900

One man escapes from a biological weapon facility after an accident, carrying with him the deadly virus known as Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu that - in the ensuing weeks - wipes out most of the world's population. In the aftermath, survivors choose between following an elderly black woman to Boulder or the dark man, Randall Flagg, who has set up his command post in Las Vegas. The two factions prepare for a confrontation between the forces of good and evil.

--Description from author’s website

Wintergirls
Laurie Halse Anderson
Lexile: 730

Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the skinniest. But what comes after size zero and size double-zero? When Cassie succumbs to the demons within, Lia feels she is being haunted by her friend’s restless spirit.

In her most emotionally wrenching, lyrically written book since the multiple-award-winning Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson explores Lia’s descent into the powerful vortex of anorexia, and her painful path toward recovery.

--Description from Penguin Books

Notes from the librarian: Although not in the same format and about eating disorders instead of drug addiciton, if you liked Go Ask Alice you might like this. The story is told from Lia's point of view and it's clear that her eating disorder is changing the way she thinks. Wintergirls can be upsetting at times, especially if you know someone who has struggled with an eating disorder.

Nonfiction

Black Hawk Down
Mark Bowden
Lexile: 970

Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen: Their wounded are bleeding to death. Their ammunition and supplies are dwindling. This is the story of how they got there -- and how they fought their way out.

Late in the afternoon of Sunday, October 3, 1993, the soldiers of Task Force Ranger were sent on a mission to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile locked in a desperate struggle to kill or be killed. Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a riveting look at the terror and exhilaration of combat, destined to become a classic of war reporting.

--Description from Simon & Schuster

Notes from the librarian: If you can't resist a good military show on Discovery or the History Channel, then Black Hawk Down is for you!

Fast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser
Lexile: 1240

Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.

Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.

--Description from HarperCollins

Notes from the librarian: If you've ever wondered where that Big Mac really came from, this is the book for you. Fast Food Nation will also appeal to anyone who's a fan of Michael Moore's documentaries and any vegetarians who want validation for their choice to avoid meat. Beware: if you love fast food, this might put you off it for awhile! Fast Food Nation was adapted into a movie in 2006, but it's nothing like the book.

Hole in My Life
Jack Gantos
Lexile: 840

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.

In Hole in My Life, this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison. But 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, and how dedicating himself more fully to the thing he most wanted to do helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life.

--Description from Macmillan Books

Look Me in the Eye
John Elder Robison
Lexile: not available

Ever since he was small, John Robison had longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” No guidance came from his mother, who conversed with light fixtures, or his father, who spent evenings pickling himself in sherry. It was no wonder he gravitated to machines, which could, at least, be counted on.

After fleeing his parents and dropping out of high school, his savant-like ability to visualize electronic circuits landed him a gig with KISS, for whom he created their legendary fire-breathing guitars. Later, he drifted into a “real” job, as an engineer for a major toy company. But the higher Robison rose in the company, the more he had to pretend to be “normal” and do what he simply couldn’t: communicate. It wasn’t worth the paycheck. It was not until he was forty that an insightful therapist told him he had the form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. That understanding transformed the way Robison saw himself—and the world.

Look Me in the Eye is the moving, darkly funny story of growing up with Asperger’s at a time when the diagnosis simply didn’t exist. A born storyteller, Robison takes you inside the head of a boy whom teachers and other adults regarded as “defective,” who could not avail himself of KISS’s endless supply of groupies, and who still has a peculiar aversion to using people’s given names (he calls his wife “Unit Two”). He also provides a fascinating reverse angle on the younger brother he left at the mercy of their nutty parents—the boy who would later change his name to Augusten Burroughs and write the bestselling memoir Running with Scissors.

--Description from Random House

Notes from the librarian: Try this book if you, a family member or a friend has a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. Look Me in the Eye can really open your eyes to what it's like to live with Asperger's.

Lucky
Alice Sebold
Lexile: 750

When Sebold, the author of the bestseller The Lovely Bones, was a college freshman at Syracuse University, she was attacked and raped on the last night of school, forced onto the ground in a tunnel "among the dead leaves and broken beer bottles." In a ham-handed attempt to mollify her, a policeman later told her that a young woman had been murdered there and, by comparison, Sebold should consider herself lucky. That dubious "luck" is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life.

Sebold launches her memoir headlong into the rape itself, laying out its visceral physical as well as mental violence, and from there spins a narrative of her life before and after the incident, weaving memories of parental alcoholism together with her post-rape addiction to heroin. Addressing rape as a larger social issue, Sebold's account reveals that there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not, though the author attempts to blur these lines as much as possible to show that violence touches many more lives than solely the victim's.

--Description from Publisher’s Weekly via Amazon.com

Notes from the librarian: If you liked Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones, you might want to try Lucky. Just be sure you're prepared to deal with the horrible details of what the author went through, it can be upsetting to read at times.

Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell
Lexile: not available

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks 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: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. 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.

--Description from Little, Brown & Company

Notes from the librarian: Many students enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt on last year's list; Outliers is a good choice for them and for anyone who wonders about the truth behind things we take for granted in day-to-day life.

Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Baseball
Dan Shaughnessy
Lexile: not available

In Senior Year, Dan Shaughnessy focuses his acclaimed sports writing talents on his son Sam's senior year of high school, a turning point in any young life and certainly in the relationship between father and son. Using that experience, Shaughnessy circles back to his own boyhood and calls on the many sports greats he's known over the years -- Ted Williams, Roger Clemens, Larry Bird -- to capture that uniquely American rite of passage that is sports.

Growing up, Dan Shaughnessy was so baseball-obsessed that he played games by himself and didn't even let himself win. His son, Sam Shaughnessy, came by his own love of sports naturally and was a natural hitter who quickly ascended the ranks of youth sports. Now nicknamed the 3-2 Kid for his astonishing ability to hover between success and failure in everything he does, Sam is finally a senior, and it's all on the line: what college to attend; how to keep his grades up and his head down until graduation; and whether his final high school baseball season, which features foul weather, a hitting slump, and a surprising clash with a longtime coach, will end in disappointment or triumph.

All along the way, Dad is there, chronicling that universal experience of putting your child out on the field -- and in the world -- and hoping for the best. With gleaming insight, wicked humor, and, at times, the searching soul of an unsure father, Shaughnessy illuminates how sports connect generations and how they help us grow up -- and let go.

--Description from Houghton Mifflin Books

Notes from the librarian: If playing sports and being on a team are important in your life, this book will speak to you, but you don't have to be an athlete to enjoy it!

Tweak
Nic Sheff
Lexile: not available

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. In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. As we watch Nic plunge the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds with his past, with his family, with his substances, and with himself. It's a harrowing portrait -- but not one without hope.

--Description from author’s website

Notes from the librarian: Nic Sheff, the author of Tweak, is incredibly honest about the horrible things he's seen and done as he has struggled with addiciton. This book can be depressing and hard to read at times, but in the end it's worth it.

Graphic Novels

The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes
Neil Gaiman
Lexile: not available

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was launched in 1989. This extremely popular series was bound into ten collections. Following Dream of the Endless, also known as Morpheus, Onieros and many other names, we explore a magical world filled with stories both horrific and beautiful.

What do you need to know to enjoy the series? Only that there are seven brothers and sisters who have been since the beginning of time, the Endless. They are Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delirium who was once Delight, and Destruction who turned his back on his duties. Their names describe their function and the realms that they are in charge of. Several years ago, a coven of wizards attempted to end death by taking Death captive, but captured Dream instead. When he finally escapes he must face the changes that have gone on in his realm, and the changes in himself.

Preludes and Nocturnes begins the series. In it, Dream, escapes his prison. He must go on a quest to find the tools of his office: his helm, pouch and ruby. The journey will take him - and us - through the gates of hell itself. It will also teach Dream an important lesson about relying on tools, and introduce us to the other star of the series, Death.

--Description from author’s website

V for Vendetta
Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Lexile: not available

A seminal graphic novel that defined sophisticated storytelling, Alan Moore's best-selling V for Vendetta is a terrifying portrait of totalitarianism and resistance, superbly illustrated by artist David Lloyd.

The graphic novel that inspired the hit movie V for Vendetta is a powerful story about loss of freedom and individuality.Set in a futuristic totalitarian England, a country without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything,a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil.

--Description from DC Comics

Notes from the librarian: Seniors reading 1984 should consider reading V for Vendetta; the setting and many of the themes are similar. It was made into a movie starring Natalie Portman in 2005.