Transcript Ridge View Reads 2011
Ridge View Reads!
Summer Reading Program 2011 Selections
Connections of the Heart
Along for the Ride
by Sarah Dessen
383 pages
Book Trailer
Auden gets a chance to recapture the carefree teen life she missed while her parents were going through a divorce when she goes to spend the summer with her dad and his new family in a charming beach town and meets fellow insomniac Eli, an intriguing loner fighting demons of his own.
(Follett)
If I Stay by Gayle Forman 208 pp.
Book Trailer
Choices. Seventeen-year-old Mia is faced with some tough ones. Stay true to her first love – music – even if it means losing her boyfriend and leaving her family and friends behind? Then, one February morning Mia goes for a drive with her family, and in an instant, everything changes. Suddenly, all the choices are gone, except one. And it’s the only one that matters. If I Stay is a heart-achingly beautiful book about the power of love, the true meaning of family and the choices we all make.
Warning: language, mature content
How To Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford 288 pages
Book Trailer
Bea is new to town and did not expect her first friend to be “Ghost Boy” Jonah who has not made a new friend since 3 rd grade and doesn’t like people in general. But they have a friendship based on truth, shared secrets, and late night phone calls to a radio station. Their friendship is not considered a romance, but they are definitely in love. Their friendship means more to them than they even know.
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Book Trailer
496 pages Cameron is a 16-year-old slacker dysfunctional family whose somewhat has just about given up on him. Maybe he is about to give up on himself. Then he is diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jacob, "mad cow" disease . Is it too late to reunite them? The heart of the story, though, is a hallucinatory —or is it?— quest with many parallels to the hopeless but inspirational efforts of Don Quixote , about whom Cameron had been reading before his illness. Just like the crazy —or was he?— Spaniard, Cam is motivated to go on a journey by a sort of Dulcinea. His pink-haired, white-winged version goes by Dulcie and leads him to take up arms against the Dark Wizard and fire giants that attack him intermittently, and to find a missing Dr. X, who can both help save the world and cure him. Warning: Language and Mature Content
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The Brothers Torres
316 Pages
by: Coert Voorhees
Book Trailer
Plot: Frankie Torres Towers wanted nothing more than to get a date with Rebecca Sanchez for the Homecoming dance. But when he angers rich kid John Dalton while trying to win her attention, he starts a series of events that force his macho older brother to protect him —but protection from this tough group of older boys and involvement in these warring factions could bring more trouble than Frankie can handle.
Games We Play
Crackback by: John Coy
Book Trailer •
208 Pages
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Miles is under a lot of pressure. He is a starter on a winning football team that is favored to win the conference and have a chance to go to state. Everyone is pressuring Miles to be bigger, stronger and faster, including his pushy new head coach, his demanding father, and his best friend. They all expect more of Miles than he may be able to deliver. When he finds out that his best friend is willing to do anything to win, including taking steroids, Miles must decide where he stands.
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Warning: Language
Ball Don’t Lie
Book Trailer 288 pages That white boy can ball… He don’t pay like no regular white boy. Sticky, 17, has spent his life being abused by pimps living with his prostitute mother, bouncing from one foster home to another, and living on the streets between failed placements. But he’s developed incredible hoop skills that have given him considerable social standing among his mostly black peers. And he gets a girlfriend named Anh-thu, who loves him and wants to help him reach his dreams. Sticky sees basketball as his way out of his dead-end life and is determined to make the right moves in the game to attain his goal. But he doesn’t quite know how to make the right moves in his life, until a bad decision leads him to confront dark secrets. Jumping back and forth in time, this first novel has a unique narrative voice that mixes street lingo, basketball jargon and trash talk to tell Sticky’s sorry saga from a variety of viewpoints.
Night Hoops by Carl Deuker 250 pp.
Book Trailer All Nick Abbott ever wanted was for his father to compliment his game. That praise has always been reserved for Nick’s older brother, Scott, a gifted athlete. When Scott choose music over basketball, Nick finally gains his father’s attention - and his win-at-all-costs mentality. As one of only three sophomores to make varsity basketball, Nick struggles with becoming a team player, especially when that means sharing the ball with Trent Dawson, the talented but troubled boy across the street. Then Nick’s mother tells Trent he can practice using Nick’s backyard hoop.
As Nick and Trent begin to play pick-up games late into the night, they also reluctantly begin to form an unusual friendship, and learn that how you play matters just as much as winning.
JUMPED by Rita Williams-Garcia 192 pages
Book Trailer
What happens when a high school girls has no idea she is about to get jumped? What is your responsibility if you do know? Leticia, a gossipy high school students, knows that “Girl fights are ugly. Girl fights are personal.” She says this after overhearing that Dominique, the tough-as-nails basketball player, is planning to beat up pink-clad fashion-plate Trina at 2:45. The infraction was minor —the oblivious Trina cut off Dominique in the hallway —but for Dominique it was the last of a series of insults, the worst of which was being benched by Coach for failing to improve her grades. Bouncing between the three first-person accounts within the span of a single school day, Williams-Garcia makes the drama feel not only immediate but suffocatingly tense, as each tick of the clock speeds the three girls toward collision. Dominique’s anger and frustration is tangible and Leticia’s hemming over whether or not to get involved feels frighteningly authentic.
Swim the Fly by: Don Calame
Book Trailer •
352 pages
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Plot: Fifteen-year-old Matt Gratton and his two best friends, Coop and Sean, always set themselves a summertime goal. This year's? To see a real-live naked girl for the first time — quite a challenge, given that none of the guys has the nerve to even ask a girl out on a date. But this looks easy compared to Matt's other goal: to swim the 100-yard butterfly as a way to impress Kelly West, the sizzling new star of the swim team.
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Warning: Language and Mature Content
Out of This World
Who Goes There
(The Thing) by John W. Campbell 168 pages
Book Trailer A group of scientific researchers, isolated in Antarctica, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice and recover an alien body or “thing” that has been frozen for thousands of years. The alien body thaws out, comes back to life, and attacks one of the sled dogs and several of the men. It can assume the shape, memories, and personality of any living thing it devours, thus becoming them. Now the scientest do not know who is who? Who is really human, and who is an alien copy?
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Book Trailer
391 pages Every year in Panem, the dystopic nation that exists where the U.S. used to be, the Capitol holds a televised tournament in which two teen "tributes” from each of the surrounding districts fight a gruesome battle to the death.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, the tributes from impoverished District Twelve, thwarted the Gamemakers, forcing them to let both teens survive. In this rabidly anticipated sequel, Katniss, again the narrator, returns home to find herself more the center of attention than ever. The sinister President Snow surprises her with a visit, and Katniss’s fear when Snow meets with her alone is both palpable and justified. Catching Fire is divided into three parts: Katniss and Peeta’s mandatory Victory Tour through the districts, preparations for the 75th Annual Hunger Games, and a truncated version of the Games themselves.
One Second After
by William Forstchen 352 pages
Book Trailer
: Want to learn about a real terrorist threat to our nation….to our way of life….to our lives!
A threat that could kill 90% of all Americans within a year.
READ this post apocalyptic novel dealing with an EMP attack on the U.S. & how people survive in the town of Black Mountain, N.C.
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The Forest of Hands and Teeth By: Carrie Ryan
320 pages Click if you dare!
Book Trailer •
Gr. 9-12 Mary lives in a small village in the middle of the forest governed by the religious Sisterhood and bordered with a fence to keep out the Unconsecrated —a horde of the undead unleashed many generations ago by a mysterious and cataclysmic event. Life is simple but preordained; Mary fears her betrothal to a man she doesn’t love almost as much as the hungry jaws slavering at the fence links. Under the colonial trappings, this is a full blooded zombie thriller, reminiscent of the paragon of the genre, George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Soon Mary and a small band of desperate survivors are thrown together to outwit the undead and work through their own weaknesses, suspicions, and jealousies. Ryan’s vision is bleak but not overly gory; her entry in the zombie canon stands out for how well she integrates romance with flesh-eating. Kraus, Daniel
Slaughterhouse-Five by: Kurt Vonnequt
Book Trailer
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200 pages
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Summary: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
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Warning: Language
Reality Reads
In the
Company
of
Heroes
by Michael J. Durant
Book Trailer
416 pages
A decade ago, Durant and his crew were shot down while flying a U.S. Army Special Operations Black Hawk helicopter in the heart of Mogadishu. The only survivor after a firefight with hostile forces of warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, the author, recounts the conditions of his 11 days in captivity, with experiences that ranged from heroic to gruesome, harrowing, bizarre, and compassionate. Suffering severe injuries to his back, leg, and face, moved under guard through a sequence of rudimentary facilities in a volatile combat environment, and facing the deadly risk of discovery by rival clans, Durant became a political pawn receiving global media attention. Each episode resonates with the sense of bonding among combat brethren, and the professional esprit and conviction behind mottoes such as "NSDQ" (Night Stalkers Don't Quit), as exemplified by Durant's squadron mates who flew above the embattled city in the days after his shoot-down, broadcasting: "Mike Durant-. We will not leave without you."
Lockdown
Choice Book Trailer
by Walter Dean Myers
256 pages Fourteen-year-old Reese broke into a doctor's office, stole prescription pads, and sold them to a drug dealer. Now he's in a juvenile detention facility in the Bronx, trying to make the right choices, the ones that will bring him an early release date. Reese has a host of things working against him: a penchant for fighting his fellow inmates, a disadvantaged background, a dysfunctional family (a drug-addicted mother, an absentee father, an older brother running with the wrong crowd). But there are also people who give him hope: a smart younger sister who seems bent on making a better life for herself; a prison superintendent who is able to overlook Reese's problems to see his potential; and, at Reese's work release program, a cantankerous old man with his own troubled past. Warning: Language and Mature Content
Book Trailer
HISTORY Why did the Nazis not use poison gas in World War II?
They had invented deadly nerve gases such as Sarin gas, which is still feared today, and they could have used them to win the war.
Black Cross
by Greg Iles 656 pages
SUMMARY
Black Cross is a novel that addresses this historical mystery as commando’s raid a Nazi concentration camp that is developing poison gases to be used against the Allied forces preparing for the D-Day invasion.
Alligator Bayou
by Donna Jo Napoli Book Trailer
288 Pages This wrenching novel is about 14-year-old Sicilian, Calogero, who joins his male relatives in Tallulah, Louisiana after his mother’s death. Legally segregated from both whites and blacks, the Italians maintain an insolated life, focused on their produce business, until Calo’s secret crush on African American Patricia begins to dissolve social barriers between the two communities, even as social tensions with whites escalate into shocking violence. Background history is integrated into the story. Readers learn, right along with naïve Calo, the specifics of Jim Crow laws and the complex factors of fear and economics that fueled the South’s bigotry. This is a gripping story that sheds new light on Southern history and on the nature of racial prejudice.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People by: Condoleezza Rice
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352 pages
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Penned by the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, this book is the story of Condoleezza Rice’s and her family’s struggle to overcome racism, sexism, and personal trials leading up to her political career. It relates the poignant history of the Rice family through the tumultuous times of the Civil Rights Movement and details the events and people that would shape her life.
Teen Issues
Wintergirls
Book trailer
by Laurie Halse Anderson
“Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
I am that girl.
I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
288 pages
Gringolandia:
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Lyn Miller
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Lachmann Book Trailer
288 pages
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Daniel’s papá, Marcelo, used to play soccer, dance the cueca, and drive his kids to school in a beat-up green taxi Chile’s military regime.
—all while publishing an underground newspaper that exposed After papá’s arrest in 1980, Daniel’s family fled to the United States. Now Daniel has a new life, playing guitar in a rock band and dating Courtney, a minister’s daughter. He hopes to become a US citizen as soon as he turns eighteen.
When Daniel’s father is released and rejoins his family, they see what five years of prison and torture have done to him. Marcelo is partially paralyzed, haunted by nightmares, and bitter about being exiled to “Gringolandia.” Daniel worries that Courtney’s scheme to start a bilingual human rights newspaper will rake up papá’s past and drive him further into alcohol abuse and self-destruction. Daniel dreams of a real father-son relationship, but he may have to give up everything simply to save his papá’s life.
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The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin
160 pages This story follows three kids through the pressure cooker of inner-city teenage life as it moves toward its crushing conclusion. The three characters couldn’t be any more different: Tamika Sykes is a partially deaf student agonizing over whether she really wants to hear all the noise surrounding her; Fatima Espérer is a 16 year-old refugee who fled the violence and poverty of her unspecified African country to live in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty; and depending on who you ask, Jimmy Sixes, already a disturbed veteran at age 18, is either a street poet or a junkie. The three form an unusual friendship, connecting both artistically and emotionally. All this is set in a city that has become a powder keg of anti immigration sentiment (thanks to a recently passed law that rewards citizens for reporting illegals) and is perilously close to the ever-present spark of gang violence. Griffin clearly knows teens, especially the way they speak. Although readers will be prepared for an unnerving journey from the opening scene, they will nevertheless be floored by some of the turns in this swift, tense, and powerful book. Grades 10-12
HATE LIST by Jennifer Brown
432 pages
Book Trailer
Valerie is alone. Her family tiptoes around her, her friends act like she doesn't exist, and most of the people in the community think she should be dead. Valerie's boyfriend, the person she trusted more than anyone else, shattered her life when he brought a gun to school and wounded several students and killed many others, including himself. Most people believe Valerie was involved, but she had no idea what Nick was planning. After spending weeks in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound to the leg, Valerie is moved to the psychiatric ward for observation. Afterwards, during her many therapy sessions, she begins to think back on her relationship with Nick and all the events that led up to the terrible act that changed an entire community. HATE LIST is an extremely powerful story. Warning: Language and Mature Content
The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks •
Book Trailer
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Number of Pages: 372
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Summary: Nina Harris is 15 years-old living at home with her mother. She’s also a vampire and hasn’t aged since 1973! The highlight of dreary existence is her Tuesday night meetings with a miserable group of vampires, and being lectured. But then a member of this motley crew is murdered and the others are now prime targets. It is now up to Nina and her punk rocker side-kick Dave to find the killer. Nina Harris will find out what it means to be a vampire.
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Warning: Language