9th Grade Independent Novel Suggested Reading List Lexile Level 700-790 Title: Hattie Big Sky Author: Kirby Larson Title: As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth Lexile: 700 Author: Lynne Rae Perkins Alone in the world, teen-aged Hattie is driven to Lexile: 730 prove up on her uncle's homesteading claim. ** A teenaged boy encounters one comedic calamity after another when his train strands him in the middle of nowhere, and everything comes down to luck. ** Title: A Northern Light Author: Jennifer Donnelly Title: The Warrior Heir Lexile: 700 Author: Cinda Williams Chima In 1906, Mattie takes a job at an inn where she Lexile: 730 discovers the truth about the death of a guest. ** After learning about his magical ancestry and his own warrior powers, sixteen-year-old Jack embarks on a training program to fight enemy wizards. ** Title: Catcher in the Rye Title: When Legends Die Author: Hall Borlund Author: J.D. Salinger Lexile: 850 Lexile: 790 When his father killed another brave, Thomas Black The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an Bull and his parents sought refuge in the wilderness. ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named There they took up life as it had been in the old Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to days, hunting and fishing, battling for survival. But preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his an accident claimed the father's life and the grieving prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in mother died shortly afterward. Left alone, the young New York City for three days. The boy himself is at Indian boy vowed never to return to the white man's once too simple and too complex for us to make any world, to the alien laws that had condemned his final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the father. * safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. * Lexile Level 800-890 Title: Bless Me Ultima Title: The House on Mango Street Author: Rudy Anaya Author: Sandra Cisneros Lexile: 840 Lexile: 870 Stories filled with wonder and the haunting beauty of The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story his culture have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the of Esperanza Cordero. father of Chicano literature in English, and his tales Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes fairly shimmer with the lyric richness of his prose. heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the Acclaimed in both Spanish and English, Anaya is story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, perhaps best loved for his classic bestseller ... inventing for herself who and what she will become. Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to Few other books in our time have touched so many stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a readers.* curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will test the bonds that tie him to his people, and discover himself in the pagan past, in his father's wisdom, and in his mother's Catholicism. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world-and will nurture the birth of his soul. * Title: As I Lay Dying Title: Dragon and Thief Author: William Faulkner Author: Timothy Zahn Lexile: 870 As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Lexile: 800 Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members— When a spaceship crashes near Jack's hiding place, including Addie herself—as well as others the novel with one survivor, his life is changed forever. ** ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.* Title: Cry, the Beloved Country Author: Alan Paton Title: Everlost Lexile: 860 "Cry, the Beloved Country" is a beautifully told and Author: Neal Shusterman profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. Lexile: 860 The book is written with such keen empathy and When Nick and Allie are killed in a car crash, they understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches end up in Everlost, or limbo for lost souls, where your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. "Cry, the Beloved Country" is a although Nick is satisfied, Allie will stop at nothing-- classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.* even skinjacking--to break free. ** Title: Trash Title: Toads and Diamonds Author: Andy Mulligan Author: Heather Tomlinson Lexile: 860 Lexile: 820 Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with A retelling of the Perrault fairy tale set in pre-colonial a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries India, in which two stepsisters receive gifts from a surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily goddess and each walks her own path to find her life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's gift's purpose, discovering ** dump. ** Lexile Level 900-990 Title: The Traitors` Gate Author: Avi Title: Old Man and the Sea Lexile: 810 Author: Ernest Hemingway When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849 Lexile: 940 London, fourteen-year-old John Huffam must take on The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban relative for help to determining why people are fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin spying on him and his family. ** far out in the Gulf Stream. * Title: I am David Title: Obasan Author: Ann Holm Author: Joy Kogawa Lexile: 980 Lexile: 990 David's entire twelve-year life has been spent in a Based on the author's own experiences, this award- grisly prison camp in Eastern Europe. He knows winning novel was the first to tell the story of the nothing of the outside world. But when he is given evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian the chance to escape, he seizes it. With his vengeful citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second enemies hot on his heels, David struggles to cope in World War. * this strange new world, where his only resources are a compass, a few crusts of bread, his two aching feet, and some vague advice to seek refuge in Denmark. Is that enough to survive? David's extraordinary odyssey is dramatically chronicled in Anne Holm's classic about the meaning of freedom and the power of hope.* Title: Pigman Author: Paul Zindel Lexile: 950 When sophomores John and Lorraine played a practical joke a few months ago on a stranger named Angelo Pignati, they had no idea what they were starting. Virtually overnight, almost against their will, the two befriended the lonely old man; it wasn't long Title: The Bean Trees before they were more comfortable in his house than Author: Barbara Kingsolver their own. But now Mr. Pignati is dead. And for John and Lorraine, the only way to find peace is to write Lexile: 900 down their friend's story -- the story of the Pigman. * The Bean Trees is bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, now widely regarded as a modern classic. It is the charming, engrossing tale of rural Kentucky native Taylor Greer, who only wants to get away from her roots and avoid getting pregnant. She succeeds, but inherits a 3-year-old native-American little girl named Turtle along the way, and together, from Oklahoma to Tucson, Arizona, half-Cherokee Taylor and her charge search for a new life in the West. * Title: Picture Bride Title: The Invisible Man Author: Yoshiko Ushida Author: Ralph Ellison Lexile: 970 Lexile: 950 Carrying a photograph of the man she is to marry The nameless narrator of the novel describes but has yet to meet, young Hana Omiya arrives in growing up in a black community in the South, San Francisco, California, in 1917, one of several attending a Negro college from which he is hundred Japanese "picture brides" whose arranged expelled, moving to New York and becoming the marriages brought them to America in the early chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the 1900s. Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man Her story is intertwined with others: her husband, he imagines himself to be. * Taro Takeda, an Oakland shopkeeper; Kiku and her husband Henry, who reject demeaning city work to become farmers; Dr. Kaneda, a respected community leader who is destroyed by the adopted land he loves. All are caught up in the cruel turmoil of World War II, when West Coast Japanese Americans are uprooted from their homes and imprisoned in desert detention camps. Although tragedy strikes each of them, the same strength that brought her to America enables Hana to survive. * Title: The Chosen Author: Chaim Potok Lexile: 970 It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to Title: Blood Red Horse each.