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. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever Author: K. M. Grant considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from Lexile: 930 again. *
Two brothers are called by King Richard to fight in
the Crusades. They are bound together by a special horse and a girl they both love. **
Title: Chasing Lincoln`s Killer Title: The Legend of Bass Reeves
Author: James L. Swanson Author: Gary Paulsen
Lexile: 980 Lexile: 950
Recounts the escape of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham An account of the life of Bass Reeves, federal
Lincoln's assassin, and follows the intensive twelve- marshal. ** day search for him and his accomplices. **
Title: Paper Covers Rock
Author: Jenny Hubbard Title: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an
Unwanted Daughter Lexile: 920
Author: Adeline Yen Mah At the beginning of his junior year at a boys'
boarding school, 16-year-old Alex is devastated Lexile: 960 when he fails to save a drowning friend. **
Yen Mah is only an infant when her father remarries after her mother's death. As the youngest of her five siblings, Wu Mei suffers the worst at the hands of her stepmother Niang. **
Lexile Level 1000-1090
Title: I Know why the Caged Bird Sings Title: My Antonia
Author: Maya Angelou Author: Willa Cather
Lexile: 1070 Lexile: 1010
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self- Set on the Nebraska prairie of the 1880s, My sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Ántonia tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda, daughter Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of of a Bohemian immigrant. Through the eyes of Jim abandonment and the prejudice of the local Burden, her tutor and admirer, we follow Ántonia's “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her struggles and triumphs in the face of life's relentless mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a hardships.* man many times her age–and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. *
Title: The Plague
Author: Albert Camus
Lexile: 1070
Title: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic Author: Dee Brown plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. * Lexile: 1080
Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian became a publishing phenomenon when first published in 1970. Now in paperback, this stunningly illustrated edition showcases more than 300 images, including maps, drawings, paintings, portraits, and photographs of notable sites and sacred battlefields. Excerpts from such acclaimed books as Where White Men Fear to Tread, along with essays by notable historians and Native American leaders like Joseph Marshall III, enhance the original text.*
Title: Farewell to Manzanar Title: Siddhartha
Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki Author: Herman Hesse
Lexile: 1040 Lexile: 1010
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, her family was uprooted from their home and sent to Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 quest for the ultimate reality. Steeped in the tenets other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight of both psychoanalysis and Eastern mysticism, towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously Siddhartha presents an original view of man and featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton culture, and the arduous process of self-discovery twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive that leads to reconciliation, harmony, and peace. * Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."
Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention . . . and of a native- born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States. *
Title: Once and Future King
Author: T.H. White
Lexile: 1080
T.H. White's masterful retelling of the saga of King Title: To the Lighthouse Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as Excalibur and Camelot, and a poignant story of adventure, Author: Virginia Woolf romance, and magic that has enchanted readers for generations. * Lexile: 1030
Every summer, the Ramsays visit their summer home on the beautiful Isle of Skye, surrounded by the excitement and chatter of family and friends, mirroring Virginia Woolf’s own joyful holidays of her
youth. But as time passes, and in its wake the First World War, the transience of life becomes ever more apparent through the vignette of the thoughts and observations of the novel’s disparate cast. *
Lexile Level 1100-1190
Title: Look Homeward, Angel
Author: Thomas Wolfe
Lexile: 1010
Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man's burning desire to Title: Mists of Avalon leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley his genius and launched a powerful legacy. Lexile: 1120 The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly and passion shape his adolescent years in rural retold through the eyes and lives of the women who North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, wielded power from behind the throne. A Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced achievement, THE MISTS OF AVALON will stay with generations of readers, including some of today's you for a long time to come. * most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader. *
Title: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Author: Alex Haley
Title: The Return of the Native Lexile: 1120
Author: Thomas Hardy From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a Lexile: 1040 dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervor of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman he became Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of eager to experience life to the full in her quest for race hatred; but to his direct audience, the 'music, poetry, passion, war'. She marries Clym oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism self-respect. * frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.*
Title: Simarillion Title: Winterdance Author: J.R.R. Tolkien Author: Gary Paulsen Lexile: 1150 Lexile: 1140 The story of the creation of the world and of the First Age, this is the ancient drama to which the Paulsen and his team of dogs endured snowstorms, characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back frostbite, dogfights, moose attacks, sleeplessness, and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and hallucinations in the relentless push to go on. * and Galadriel, took part. The three Silmarils were jewels created by Feanor, most gifted of the Elves. Within them was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor before the Trees themselves were * Description from Amazon.com destroyed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Thereafter, the unsullied Light of Valinor lived on **Description from Weber County Library only in the Silmarils, but they were seized by Morgoth and set in his crown, which was guarded in http://www.weberpl.lib.ut.us/content/booklists the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth. THE SILMARILLION is the history of the /sort/t/47 rebellion of Feanor and his kindred against the gods, their exile from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all their heroism, against the great Enemy. *
Title: Ethan Frome
Author: Edith Wharton
Lexile: 1160
Tragic story of wasted lives, set against a bleak New England background. A poverty-stricken New England farmer, his ailing wife and a youthful housekeeper are drawn relentlessly into a deep- rooted domestic struggle in this hauntingly grim tale of thwarted love. Considered by many to be Wharton's masterpiece. *