2012+Books


 * Each book can be listed as a different discussion topic in the Discussion tab above. When you have read a book, add a new post with the title of the book. Give your name, the book summary, and your five practice questions for that book. The summary should include information such as the time period, setting, list of main characters, etc., and anything that would help your teammates better understand the book. **

__**2012 Book List & Summaries**__

The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action.
 * Because I am Furniture by Thalia Chaltas**

Chronicles one young woman's emotional breakdown as she journeys from the glamorous world of Manhattan publishing to the isolation of the asylum.
 * Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath**

Two star high school basketball players, one black and one white, experience the justice system differently after committing a crime together and getting caught.
 * Black and White by Paul Volponi**

Torey Adams, a high school junior with a seemingly perfect life, struggles with doubts and questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance of the class outcast.
 * The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci**

Despite the strained relationship between them, teenaged Sami Sabiri risks his life to uncover the truth when his father is implicated in a terrorist plot.
 * Borderline by Allan Stratton**

A world of tomorrow in which capitalist civilization has been reconstituted through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering.
 * Brave New World by Aldous Huxley**

Ever since she was a child, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Gemma's stories about Briar Rose. But a promise Rebecca makes to her dying grandmother will lead her on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Gemma's astonishing claim: //I am Briar Rose//. A journey that will lead her to unspeakable brutality and horror. But also to redemption and hope.
 * Briar Rose by Jane Yolen**

A girl's struggle amid the African AIDS pandemic, Chanda, is an astonishingly perceptive girl living in the small city of Bonang, a fictional city in Southern Africa. When her youngest sister dies, the first hint of HIV/AIDS emerges, Chanda must confront undercurrents of shame and stigma. Not afraid to explore the horrific realities of AIDS, Chanda's Secrets also captures the enduring strength of loyalty, friendship and family ties. Above all, it is a story about the corrosive nature of secrets and the healing power of truth.
 * Chanda's Secrets by Allan Stratton**

Dave Pelzer shares his unforgettable story of the many abuses he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic mother and the averted eyes of his neglectful father. Someone with no one to turn to, his dreams barely kept him alive
 * A Child Called “It” by Dave Peltzer**

On the payroll as an assistant to her coroner father, seventeen-year-old Cameryn Mahoney uses her knowledge of forensic medicine to catch the killer of a friend while putting herself in terrible danger.
 * The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson**

Five days ago, a homeless man on a subway platform died in agony as startled commuters looked on. Yesterday, a teenager started having violent, uncontrollable spasms in art class. Within minutes, she too was dead. Dr. Alice Austen is a medical pathologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. What she knows is that the two deaths are connected. What she fears is that they are only the beginning.
 * Cobra Event by Richard Preston**

The story of James McBride and his mother—a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a church, and put 12 children through college.
 * Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride**

Two fifteen-year-old girls--one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.
 * Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper**

Miles barely recalls when football was fun after being sidelined by a new coach, constantly criticized by his father, and pressured by his best friend to take performance-enhancing drugs.
 * Crackback by John Coy**

After spending her summer running the family farm and training the quarterback for her school's rival football team, sixteen-year-old D.J. decides to go out for the sport herself, not anticipating the reactions of those around her.
 * Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock**

When her unstable mother dies unexpectedly, sixteen-year-old Lucy must take control and find a way to keep the long-held secret of her mother's compulsive hoarding from being revealed to friends, neighbors, and especially the media.
 * Dirty Little Secrets by C.J. Omololu**

A portrait of the basketball culture of Fort Yukon, Alaska, describes the community's devotion to their championship high-school basketball team and follows the lives of the fourteen team members, their families, and their coach.
 * Eagle Blue: A Team, A Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Artic Alaska by Michael D'Orso**

In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.
 * Feed by M.T. Anderson**

Telephoto lens. Zoom. In a shutter release millisecond, Blake's world turns upside down. The nameless woman with the snake tattoo is not just another assignment. 'That's my mom!' gasps Marissa. Saturated self-portrait: Blake, nice guy, class clown, always trying to get a laugh, not sure where to focus. Contrast. Shannon, Blake's GF. Total. Babe. Marissa, just a friend and fellow photographer. Shannon loves him; Marissa needs him. How is he supposed to frame them both in one shot?
 * Flash Burnout by L.K. Madigan**

Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was just out of high school. At age nineteen he was deployed to Iraq. His year in combat changed his life.
 * Ghosts of War: the True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI by Ryan Smithson**

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but also herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.
 * Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok**

Sent by their mother to their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” When she journeys at eight to her mother’s side in St. Louis, she is attacked by a man many times her age. Years later, in San Francisco, she learns about love for herself–and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. The kindness of others, Maya’s own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
 * I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou**

The lives of Leticia, Dominique, and Trina are irrevocably intertwined through the course of one day in an urban high school after Leticia overhears Dominique's plans to beat up Trina and must decide whether or not to get involved.
 * Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia**

A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.
 * A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines**

Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.
 * Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork**

Follows the life story of an exuberant golden Labrador who gets into perpetual trouble and experiences a range of inspiring adventures, from shutting down an entire beach to guarding a seventeen-year-old neighbor after a stabbing attack.
 * Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan**

In the society, officials decide who you love, where you work and when you die. Cassia has always trusted their choices. It's hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen. Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one, until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices, between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path no one else has ever dared follow, between perfection and passion.
 * Matched by Allyson Braithwaite Condie**

Fifteen-year-old Jem knows when she looks at someone the exact date they will die, so she avoids relationships and tries to keep out of the way, but when she meets a boy named Spider and they plan a day out together, they become more involved than either of them had planned.
 * Num8ers by Rachel Ward**

//Our Town// explores the lives of people living in a small, quintessentially American town called Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, in 1901.
 * Our Town by Thorton Wilder**

Manny relates his coming of age experiences as a member of a poor Mexican American family in which the alcoholic father only adds to everyone's struggle.
 * Parrot in the Oven by Victor Martinez**

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether.
 * Plainsong by Kent Haruf**

Arrested on a minor offense, a New York City teenager attends high school in the jail facility on Rikers Island, as he waits for his case to go to court.
 * Rikers High by Paul Volponi**

Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.
 * Runner by Carl Deuker**

After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, beekeeping sisters.
 * The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd**

In a savage postnuclear world, four young fugitives attempt to overthrow the bloodthirsty rule of the Overlords with the help of Shade, their mysterious mentor.
 * Shade's Children by Garth Nix**

In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl in the wreckage, he has to decide if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.
 * Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi**

In all the years she has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house, Grace has been particularly drawn to an unusual yellow-eyed wolf who, in his turn, has been watching her with increasing intensity.
 * Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater**

Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim, a shattered survivor of the Dresden bombing, relives his life over and over again under the gaze of aliens; he comes at last to some understanding of the human comedy.
 * Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut**

Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi, though poor, enjoys her life until the Himalayan monsoons wash away her family's crops and she is sold to a brothel in India by her stepfather. She remembers her mother's wisdom, "Simply to endure is to triumph," until the day comes that she can reclaim her life.
 * Sold by Patricia McCormick**

The author recounts in graphic novel format his troubled childhood with a radiologist father who subjected him to repeated x-rays and a withholding and tormented mother, an environment he fled at the age of sixteen in the hopes of becoming an artist.
 * Stitches: a Memoir by David Small**

Ashley spent nine years in foster care after being taken away from her mother. She endured many caseworkers, moving from school to school and manipulative, humiliating and abusive treatment from one foster family. See how she survives and eventually thrives against the odds.
 * Three Little Words: a Memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter**

Sixteen-year-old Celestia is a wealthy member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, where she meets and falls in love with Peter, a hired hand who lives in the valley below, and by the time of the torrential rains that lead to the disastrous Johnstown flood of 1889, she has been disowned by her family and is staying with him in Johnstown. Includes an author's note and historical timeline.
 * Three Rivers Rising: a Novel of the Johnstown Flood by Jame Richards**

Told from the point of view of the women of Troy, portrays the last weeks of the Trojan War, when women are sick of tending the wounded, men are tired of fighting, and bored gods and goddesses find ways to stir things up.
 * Troy by Adele Geras**

Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.
 * Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher**

Based on the fairy tale Rapunzel, the story is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of Zel, her mother, and the nobleman who pursues her, and delves into the psychological motivations of each of the characters.
 * Zel by Donna Jo Napoli**