12th Grade Summer Reading 2021
AP ENGLISH IV The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• Required for all AP ENG IV students
• Multiple narrators tell the story of Dominican American Oscar de León and his friend Yunior and sister Lola.
• Diaz uses flashbacks to tell how Oscar’s family escaped the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and how they are plagued by a curse. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
In addition, all Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia students must read one of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood these titles: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997. The novel tells the story of a multi- generational household in Kerala, India. Roy explores complex issues of the caste system, British colonialism, and India’s long history of religious strife as these play out in the family of fraternal twins Estha and Rahel. Mexican Gothic
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican-Canadian author of several books. This is a gothic horror novel set in the 1950s in the Mexican countryside.
• Noemi, a debutante with a love of fashion, receives an urgent call from her cousin, asking for help. Noemi travels to the remote family home of the Doyles to rescue Catalina from her new husband and his strange family.
• Strange occurrences and frightening events begin as soon as she arrives. The Blind Assassin
• Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer. The Handmaid’s Tale is probably her best-known work.
• The Blind Assassin is a story of two sisters growing up in southern Ontario. It contains a novel-within-a-novel, which itself contains a science fiction story. Salvage the Bones
• Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction for this novel.
• In rural Mississippi during the weeks leading up to Hurricane Katrina, 14-year- old Esch and her brothers do what they can to prepare.
• Getting by on very little, with almost no help from the adults in their lives, the siblings work to protect their family and their dog, China, and her litter of puppies, as the storm bears down.