Rising 8th graders Book Reports are due on September 24th

Middle School Summer Reading Program

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  Rising 8th graders have two mandatory books in bold. and one other book of their choice from the list They will then write a report, (attached), on the mandatory books. and complete a 5x7 note card for the third book listing the title, authors name, main characters and a breif summary of the books plot in the students own words.
  

This can be broken down to a book a month. All books can be found in the Leon County Public Library, Wal-mart, and Borders ENJOY!

Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.

Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.

and

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. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

It was a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn--a perfect September day. Wendy is heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her jazz musician stepfather. She's out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Her mother's building.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, 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. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household

When Gruwell was a first-year high school teacher in Long Beach, CA, teaching the "unteachables" (kids that no other teacher wanted to deal with), she discovered that most of her students had not heard of the Holocaust. Shocked, she introduced them to books about toleranceAfirst-person accounts by the likes of Anne Frank and Zlata Filopvic, who chronicled her life in war-torn Sarajevo. The students were inspired to start keeping diaries of their lives that showed the violence, homelessness, racism, illness, and abuse that surrounded them.

Sampson, George, and Rameck could easily have followed their childhood friends into drugdealing, gangs, and prison. Like their peers, they came from poor, single-parent homes in urban neighborhoods where survival, not scholastic success, was the priority. When the three boys met in a magnet high school in Newark, they recognized each other as kindred spirits who wanted to overcome the incredible odds against them and reach for opportunity. They made a friendship pact, deciding together to take on the biggest challenge of their lives: attending college and then medical school. Along the way they made mistakes and faced disappointments, but by working hard, finding the right mentors, separating themselves from negative influences, and supporting each other, they achieved their goals—and more.

A Separate Peace is the story of two teenage boys, Gene and Phineas. Told through the eyes of Gene many years after the events of the novel, the story is about Gene's experience at boarding school and his relationship with Phineas who is more popular and more athletic and outgoing. With the backdrop of World War II, the novel reveals profound insights into human nature and will leave the reader astounded by the end.

The Good Earth is a novel about peasant life in China during the 1920s. (Pulitzer Prize winner) Read for the beauty of the descriptions of China, a hard life of farming and the simplicity of the well written characters. There will be a test on the book the first week of school followed by in-class discussion.

Arthur Dent escapes the planet Earth a few seconds before it is demolished to make way for an intergalactic freeway. With his friend, Ford Prefect, he hitches rides to different parts of the galaxy and takes part in several humorous adventures.

 

Cormier, Robert     The Chocolate War

A high school student becomes first a hero and then a victim through intimidation and the misuse of power.