AP/Pre-AP/GT Summer Reading Assignment

Students who select an Advanced Placement or Pre-Advanced Placement English Course (or AP/GT, PreAP/GT) in grades 7-12 have a required summer reading assignment. Prior to the first day of school, the AP, PreAP, AP/GT or PreAP/GT English student should select and carefully read one of the titles for his/her grade level and course. The summer reading assignment applies to students entering AP, PreAP, AP/GT or PreAP/GT English in grades 7-12.

For the summer of 2009, your child must select and carefully read one title listed below that corresponds with his/her grade level and course.

• Language Arts 7E PreAP, Language Arts 7R PreAP or Language Arts 7C PreAP/GT
• Language Arts 8E PreAP or Language Arts 8E PreAP/GT
• English I PreAP or English I PreAP/GT
• English II PreAP or English II PreAP/GT
• AP English Language and Composition or AP English Language and Composition
• AP English Literature and Composition or AP English Literature and Composition

Language Arts 7E PreAP, Language Arts 7R PreAP or Language Arts 7C PreAP/GT

Tangerine by Edward Bloor
Paul Fisher’s older brother is a high school football star, but to Paul he’s no hero. Paul’s own game is soccer, which he plays even though he has to wear thick glasses because of a mysterious eye injury. When the Fishers move to Tangerine, Florida, Paul tries to make sense of things. But it’s not easy. In Tangerine, underground fires burn for years and lightening strikes the same practice field every day. Strange things happen here all the time – but nothing is stranger than the secrets Paul discovers about his brother, his new group of friends, and his own dangerous past.

The Last Book in the Universeby Rodman Philbrick
In a world where most people are plugged into brain drain entertainment systems, epileptic teenager Spaz is a rare human being who can see life for what it really is. When he meets an old man called Ryter, he begins to learn about earth and its past. With Ryter as his companion, Spaz sets off on an unlikely quest to save his dying sister ­ and in the process, perhaps the world.

Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California.  Once there, they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

Language Arts 8E PreAP or Language Arts 8E PreAP/GT

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of year, but by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. Red herrings galore are put in the path of Hercule Poirot to try to keep him off the scent, but in a dramatic denouement he succeeds in coming up with not one but two solutions to the crime.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
Could the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound which is said to have haunted his family for generations? Arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes characteristically dismisses the theory as nonsense. Claiming to be immersed in another case, he sends Watson to Devon to protect the Baskerville heir and to observe the suspects at close hand.

English I PreAP or English I PreAP/GT

Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Lily Owens is an emotionally abused fourteen year old girl growing up with an uncaring father on a peach farm in rural South Carolina. Lily remembers bits and pieces about her mother whose accidental death continually haunts her. Lily was four when her mother died, but she has kept a few of her mother’s prized possessions. One of these possessions is the picture of a black Madonna with the words, Tiburon, South Carolina, written on the back. She finds a way out when her African American caretaker, Rosaleen, decides to register to vote but is arrested for insulting some of the town’s racist residents. Thus, Lily and Rosaleen set out for Tiburon, where Lily hopes to find information about her mother. She meets the calendar sisters—August, May, and June---who own a honey farm. While staying with the sisters, Lily learns about social injustice and the broader evils of society. While racial tensions increase, the sisters help Lily accept her loss and learn the power of forgiveness.

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Set in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s, the novel centers on two men’s redemption. One man is Jefferson, a twenty-one year old African American man who faces a death sentence. The other man is Grant Wiggins, a college educated African American native of the town who has returned to teach at the plantation school for African American children. A jury convicts Jefferson, who is nearly illiterate, of murder because of his presence at a store robbery during which a white man was killed. Although his attorney pleads he is too simple-minded, he receives the death penalty. His godmother, Emma Glenn wishes to educate Jefferson so he will die with dignity. She hires Grant Wiggins to educate Jefferson. Both Jefferson and Glenn, through no choice of their own, come together and form a bond in the realization that sometimes simply choosing to resist the expected is an act of heroism.

English II PreAP or English II PreAP/GT

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Road by Cormac McCarthy follows an incredible journey of a father and son as they travel across a burned-out, post-apocalyptic America. Alone, they must forage for food in abandoned towns and cities and defend themselves from lawless bands who would do them harm and steal what little they scrounge up. When seemingly no hope remains for the pair, the love and devotion of the father keeps them alive in the face of total devastation. The novel contains the message of the valleys and mountains every human must cross, and how in the end we have only self-reliance and faith.

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
Nine-year old Liesel steals a gravedigger’s instruction manual and begins her lifelong fascination with books in The Book Thief, winner of the 2007 Printz Award for Teen Literature. Narrated by Death, this story of the German families in World War II and one particular family who hides a Jew is a heart-wrenching tale of the power of words and books to change lives. Though the longer of the two books, this is truly a “good read.”

AP English Language and Composition or AP English Language and Composition

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan
The dust storms that terrorized America’s High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Price- winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with a window sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survive- those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will coon carry their memories to the grave-Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Winner of the 2006 National Book Award

AP English Literature and Composition or AP English Literature and Composition

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it – from garden seeds to Scripture – is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy.

Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto’s lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story, from her family’s difficult passage out of Ireland into Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas Kinnear’s household. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot remember, he hears of the turbulent relationship between Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery, and of the alarming behavior of Grace’s fellow servant, James McDermott. Jordan is drawn to Grace, but he is also baffled by her. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend, a bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she a victim of circumstances?