| Angelou, Maya |
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 1972 |
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Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant. |
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| Anonymous |
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Go Ask Alice 1971 |
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Based on the diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user chronicling her struggle to escape the pull of the drug world. |
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| Atwood, Margaret |
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The Handmaid's Tale 1986 |
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Set in the near future, it describes life in what once was the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead. Reacting to social unrest, and a sharply declining birthrate, the new regime has reverted to -- even gone beyond -- the repressive tolerance of the original Puritans. |
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| Blume, Judy |
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Deenie 1973 |
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A thirteen-year-old girl seemingly destined for a modeling career finds she has a deformation of the spine called scoliosis. |
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| Blume, Judy |
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Forever 1975 |
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Two high school seniors believe their love to be so strong that it will last forever. |
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| Blume, Judy |
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Tiger Eyes 1981 |
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Resettled in the "Bomb City" with her mother and brother, Davey Wexler recovers from the shock of her father's death during a holdup of his 7-Eleven store in Atlantic City. |
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| Chbosky, Stephen |
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower. 1999 |
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A coming of age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend. |
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| Collier, James Lincoln |
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My Brother Sam is Dead 1974 |
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Recounts the tragedy that strikes the Meeker family during the Revolution when one son joins the rebel forces while the rest of the family tries to stay neutral in a Tory town. |
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| Cooney, Caroline B. |
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The Face on the Milk Carton. 1990 |
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A photograph of a missing girl on a milk carton leads Janie on a search for her real identity.
Sequels include Whatever Happened to Janie, The Voice on the Radio and What Janie Found. |
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| Cooney, Caroline B. |
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The Terrorist. 1997 |
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Sixteen-year-old Laura, an American living in London, tries to find the person responsible for the death of her younger brother Billy, who has been killed by a terrorist bomb. |
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| Cormier, Robert |
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The Chocolate War 1974 |
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A high school freshman discovers the devastating consequences of refusing to join in the school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of the school bullies. |
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| Duncan, Lois |
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Killing Mr. Griffin 1978 |
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A teenager casually suggests playing a cruel trick on the English teacher, but did he intend it to end with murder? |
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| Frank, Anne |
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Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl 1952 |
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| Garden, Nancy |
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Annie on My Mind 1982 |
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Liza puts aside her feelings for Annie after the disaster at school, but eventually she allows love to triumph over the ignorance of people. |
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| Golding, William |
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Lord of the Flies 1954 |
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An adventure tale in its purest form, this thrilling account of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island exposes the duality of human nature itself--the dark, eternal divide between order and chaos, intellect and instinct, structure and savagery. |
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| Green, Bette |
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Summer of My German Soldier 1973 |
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Sheltering an escaped German prisoner of war is the beginning of some shattering experiences for a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Arkansas. |
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| Hawthorne, Nathaniel |
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The Scarlet Letter 1850 |
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'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide. |
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| Heller, Joseph |
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Catch-22: A Novel 1961 |
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A bombardier, based in Italy during World War II, repeatedly tries to avoid flying bombing missions while his colonel tries to get him killed by demanding that he fly more and more missions. |
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| Henkes, Kevin |
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Olive's Ocean. 2003 |
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On a summer visit to her grandmother's cottage by the ocean, twelve-year-old Martha gains perspective on the death of a classmate, on her relationship with her grandmother, on her feelings for an older boy, and on her plans to be a writer. |
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| Hinton, S.E. |
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The Outsiders 1967 |
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The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society. |
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| Hinton, S.E. |
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That Was Then, This is Now 1971 |
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Sixteen-year-old Mark and Bryon have been like brothers since childhood, but now, as their involvement with girls, gangs, and drugs increases, their relationship seems to gradually disintegrate. |
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| Huxley, Aldous |
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Brave New World. 1932 |
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Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future" where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. |
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| Kesey, Ken |
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 1962 |
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The story of a man whose rebelliousness pits him against the head nurse of a mental ward and the full spectrum of institutional repression. |
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| Keyes, Daniel |
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Flowers for Algernon. 1966 |
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"Flowers for Algernon" is the beloved, classic story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse. |
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| Lee, Harper |
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To Kill a Mockingbird 1960 |
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Two children in a small southern town are thrust into an adult world of racial bigotry and hatred when their lawyer father chooses to defend a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl. |
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| Lowry, Lois |
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The Giver 1993 |
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Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. |
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| Myers, Dean Walter |
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Fallen Angels 1988 |
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Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam. |
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| Myracle, Lauren |
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TTYL. 2004 |
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Chronicles, in "instant message" format, the day-to-day experiences, feelings, and plans of three friends, Zoe, Maddie, and Angela, as they begin tenth grade.
Sequels include TTFN and L8r, G8r. |
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| Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds |
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The Alice Series. 1985 - Present |
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Eleven-year-old, motherless Alice decides she needs a gorgeous role model who does everything right; and when placed in homely Mrs. Plotkins's class she is greatly disappointed until she discovers it's what people are inside that counts. |
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| Orwell, George |
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Animal Farm 1945 |
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A political satire in which animals take over running a farm but find their utopian state turning into a dictatorship. |
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| Orwell, George |
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Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 |
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| Peck, Robert Newton |
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A Day No Pigs Would Die 1972 |
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To a thirteen-year-old Vermont farm boy whose father slaughters pigs for a living, maturity comes early as he learns "doing what's got to be done," especially regarding his pet pig who cannot produce a litter. |
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| Pullman, Philip |
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The Golden Compass. 1996 |
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Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.
Sequels include The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. |
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| Rowling, J.K. |
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Harry Potter Series 1997-2007 |
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| Salinger, J.D. |
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The Catcher in the Rye 1951 |
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Holden, knowing that he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there. |
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| Steinbeck, John |
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The Grapes of Wrath 1939 |
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The migration of the Joad family to California from their dust-bowl farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. |
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| Steinbeck, John |
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Of Mice and Men 1937 |
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In depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences. |
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| Trumbo, Dalton |
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Johnny Got His Gun 1939 |
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In 1918 a soldier too badly wounded and has both his arms and legs amputated. Plunged into a chilling nightmare, we hear the youngt war victim's thoughts. |
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| Twain, Mark |
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884 |
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The adventures of a young boy traveling down the Mississippi Rover with an escaped slave. |
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| Twain, Mark |
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876 |
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The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town in the early nineteenth century. |
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| Walker, Alice |
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The Color Purple. 1982 |
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Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self. |
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| Zindel, Paul |
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The Pigman 1968 |
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A teenage boy and girl, high school sophomores from unhappy homes, tell of their bizarre relationship with an old man |
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